Resurrection (Kuang ye shi dai)

 

Director Bi Gan 

director and cast on the red carpet at Cannes

Shu Qi at Cannes, 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RESURRECTION (Kuang ye shi dai)                       B+                                                       China  France  USA  (160 mi)  2025  d: Bi Gan

Unlike any other film you’ll ever see, a radical departure from any other cinema experience, Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan, the maker of such extraordinary films as 2016 Top Ten List #2 Kaili Blues (Lu bian ye can) and 2019 Top Ten List #6 Long Day's Journey Into Night (Di qiu zui hou de ye wan), has been described by Canadian writer, critic, and Chinese film curator Shelly Kraicer, who lived in Beijing for more than a decade, as the anti-Jia Zhangke ('Resurrection' review by Shelly Kraicer), now moving in a completely new direction, more modernist, with a stream-of-consciousness spirit, as movie references abound, becoming an ode to cinema and a lamentation for our times, creating an imaginary sci-fi universe that lives only in the imagination, which becomes the beating heart that lives within us, coinciding with the life of dreams, which cease to exist when the body dies.  But new life emerges with every subsequent conscious existence, allowing the life cycle to begin again with a true out-of-body experience.  Seemingly inspired by the darkly immersive atmospheric tone of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), writer/director Bi Gan and co-writer Zhai Xiaohui spent years in the lab constructing a new cinematic vision for this film, which was literally years in the making, as his last feature was seven years ago, but this nearly three-hour venture is a different kind of cinematic excursion that requires an open mind, as it simply resists logical evaluation and sets itself apart from the rest, like a time-traveling experience existing almost entirely in dream language.  A late edition to the Cannes lineup in 2025, added just five days before the festival began, winning a Special Grand Jury Prize, where jury president Juliette Binoche likened it to an “unidentified flying object,” the film has been re-edited since that initial premiere, yet it remains confusing enough, where it will be difficult for anyone to make sense of this sprawling epic work that simply goes places we’ve never been, yet the acclaim for this film will likely only grow over time.  Unraveling over the course of 100 years, like an anthology of short stories without chapter headings, told in six segments, with each one corresponding to one of the six senses recognized in Buddhist thought (The Six Sense Bases), sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind, where the protagonist in each segment is Jackson Yee, a Chinese actor, singer, and member of boy group TFBoys, who takes on five different roles, working with the director for a year and a half to make this film.  While there are multiple movie references, which the director takes in new directions, it’s difficult to say where this stands in Chinese movie history, as it’s remarkably ambitious visually, creating something onscreen that is simply unimaginable, yet it remains distanced and aloof, only occasionally connecting emotionally, leaving viewers befuddled and perplexed at the audaciousness of what they’ve just experienced.  Ultimately the film is something of a puzzlebox that the director himself wanted to watch, which makes perfect sense.      

Title cards explain that the film is set in a post-apocalyptic future when humanity has achieved immortality, but only by giving up dreaming, while those that continue to dream are called Deliriants, outcasts viewed as monsters that are knowingly veering towards their own death, living on a different level of human existence from the others, supposedly “bringing pain to reality and chaos to history.”  Using narratives that transcend space and time, moving from Silent-era German Expressionism to film noir to a Chinese ghost story to a phantastical vampire love story, shot by Dong Jingsong through various color filters, the film utilizes a film-within-a-film technique, opening in a silent movie theater, where film is considered part of an ancient forgotten past, with Bi Gan’s film dealing with the resurrection of dreams, of cinema, and of memory itself.  We discover a woman known as the Big Other, Shu Qi from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s MILLENNIUM MAMBO (2001),  THREE TIMES (2005), and 2015 Top Ten List #9 The Assassin (Nie Yinniang), who is capable of seeing through illusions, and is assigned to bringing Deliriants back to reality, sent to hunt them down, just like the hunt for Replicants in Blade Runner, gifted with the rare power to perceive these illusions for what they truly are, as she chooses to enter the monster’s dreams, determined to uncover the truth that lies hidden within.  Starting in an old Chinese opium den, elaborately constructed, like a dollhouse, featuring a multi-level space with adjoining rooms, windows, and walkways, each rendering a different activity, Resurrection (2025) Dir. Bi Gan : r/CineShots YouTube (46 seconds), but occasionally an outsized human hand intercedes, as she follows a secret underground passageway, like falling down an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole, where she discovers a grotesque Nosferatu-resembling Deliriant (Jackson Yee) munching on raw poppy flowers to help stimulate his dreams, but they are killing him.  Unable to understand his irrational compulsion, she discovers a movie projector for a heart, and decides to load it with film, allowing him to replay his past life in dreams before dying, as a series of four elaborately constructed dreams (framed by a prologue and epilogue) unfold before our eyes, with a brief shot of a wax candle melting and Shu Qi’s voiceover coming between each section, chronologically representing an unnamed historical period and a different period of cinema, which acts like a portal into the world of the subconscious imagination, taking us upon a shape-shifting odyssey through illusion, beauty, and terror that takes him across a century of cinema and to the end of time.

What stands out in all three Bi Gan films is the complex visual style, each featuring extended one-shot takes that extend beyond 30-minutes, become a signature aspect of his filmmaking, which is never less than enthralling, arguably a natural extension from the seductive, all-consuming style that began with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s neon-splashed, adrenaline-rush submersion into the techno-scored nightlife of Taipei in MILLENNIUM MAMBO, connected, of course, by actress Shu Qi.  Tinged with science fiction and fantasy, with a layered synthesized soundtrack by French electro-duo M83, while paying tribute to various movie genres, it’s important to note that in every iteration, the character Jackson Yee portrays is an outlaw, with a dream sequence moving into the lead-up of WWII and film noir territory, shot using a blue color filter or featuring the pervasive use of the color, where he appears to be a musician/spy suspect/political prisoner who is both reviled and revered because of his voice, capable of inducing madness in men, a homoerotic object of desire for both the Composer (Yan Nan) and the Commander (Mark Chao), one wanting to hear his voice, while the other wants to unlock his precious secrets, FNC 2025 | Resurrection (Bi Gan) (51 seconds).  Nearly indecipherable, this mysterious segment involves a fleeting reference to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s DAY OF WRATH (1943), an elaborate prison, a lengthy interrogation, a near-death train incident, a missing suitcase, a theremin, an Orson Welles’ LADY OF SHANGHAI (1947) house of mirrors, a panicked train station engulfed in fog, the stabbing of eardrums, and the last sounds heard, the warbling sounds of a Bach song, BWV 478, “Come, sweet death, come, blessed rest” played on a theremin which magically closes one world while opening another.  That song foreshadows a series of deaths that are yet to come.  The next sequence jumps ahead to the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960’s, a winter’s tale with snow inexplicably covering the ground of an abandoned Buddhist monastery, where a former monk, known as Mongrel, goes on a looting spree of locating Buddha statues before destroying them, all part of destroying the old ways, yet succumbing to a fever-inducing toothache, using a broken piece to knock out his rotten tooth, inducing the “Spirit of Bitterness,” who takes human form (Bi’s uncle, Chen Yongzhong, appearing in all his films).  The two engage in witty banter before the spirit, assuming the appearance of his late father, transports us into his dreamworld, reflective of a Chinese ghost story, revealing a mysterious backstory, offering a window into China’s dark past, where a dog reflects the karmic punishment for betraying the past, with Mongrel quickly realizing the past cannot be destroyed, as it exists in our minds and imagination.

Jia is a con artist during the onset of China’s market economy in the 80’s, who schemes to win prize money offered by an Old Man crime boss (Zhang Zhijian) who executes people who cross him.  In a world ruled by money, Jia befriends an orphan (Guo Mucheng), teaching her a card trick, hoping to convince the Old Man in the supernatural, or that she can identify a card simply by smelling it.  Posing as Jia’s daughter, even while blindfolded and wired to a lie detector machine, she manages to outwit the Old Man and win a cash prize, which they split before Jia leaves town and is immediately robbed and left for dead.  Meanwhile, the Old Man summons the girl for his real purpose, having abandoned his own daughter years ago, but longs to read a burnt out letter she wrote before she died in a fire.  Using the power of smell, she surprises us all by reading aloud the full contents of the letter written to an absent father.  In what is arguably the most elaborately staged segment, the pièce de résistance is a nearly forty-minute single-take tale that begins with a fireworks sequence, shot with breathtaking technical brilliance, mostly through a red color filter of rainy streets and smoky nightclubs, set during a millennium celebration on New Year’s Eve in 1999, as the Deliriant is reborn as Apollo, a reckless young hoodlum who has never been kissed, but is unfazed watching someone get strung up near the docks, yet when he meets a free-spirited young girl Tai Zhaomei (Li Gengxi), who may be a vampire but has never bitten anyone, his fortunes turn, no longer feeling alone.  As they run through abandoned buildings and back alleyways like the young kids in Godard’s ode to youth, Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part) (1964), caught up in a world of dream and reality, this becomes an evocation of youthful hope and joy at the dawn of the new millennium.  But there’s a catch, as she works for a mob boss, Mr. Lu (Huang Jue), feeding on blood that he supplies from his victims, turning into an eerie vampire love story, including an astonishing nightclub sequence, Resurrection (2025) - Nightclub Karaoke Scene YouTube (9:18), with its constantly moving camera, where Apollo gets the snot kicked out of him, but he perseveres, using a time-lapse technique to go from night to the next morning, yet just when they think they can escape it all, kissing passionately on a barge right out of Vigo’s L'Atalante (1934) in the moments before sunrise, their own combustible passion self destructs, effectively ending their dream.  In an epilogue, Shu Qi’s Big Other wraps things up, dressing up Apollo to resemble the original Deliriant, setting his corpse free in a gigantic vault filled with liquid, Resurrection 2025 Movie Ending Scene YouTube (2:16), returning us back to the wax movie theater filled with illuminated patrons, but one by one, each light goes out until only darkness remains, as the film ends with the theater, like time itself, melting away.  Yet if this film proves anything, it is that dreams, or inner freedom, is the one thing that cannot be controlled by outside forces.  

2019 Top Ten List #6 Long Day's Journey Into Night (Di qiu zui hou de ye wan)

Director Bi Gan

 

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (Di qiu zui hou de ye wan)       A-                   

China  France  (138 mi)  2018 d:  Bi Gan

Bi Gan is capturing the world’s attention with his new film, opening at the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, as he’s redefining what cinema can be, creating intoxicating imagery through a daring and innovative style, where the final hour is thoroughly enchanting and transfixing, shot in a single, unbroken take in 3D, which he apparently captured on his 5th and final take, cutting his earlier attempts short, dissatisfied by elements of the production design which did not meet his aesthetic criteria.  Bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the Eugene O’Neill title, instead the Chinese title, Last Evenings On Earth, comes from a short story by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, a writer whose works are elusive and powerfully suggestive.  Similarly, Bi Gan has created a world where dreams and memories intersect, becoming at times thoughts that can only be imagined, that never happened in real life, but are just as vital and relevant to the existential lead character, absorbed in his own thoughts and his own life, as in his mind they could have happened, as the mind wanders, yet may have existed only in his dreams.  This haunting netherworld is what interests this director, as he’s nothing less than brilliant in his ability to visually convey fractured stories that fully capture the viewer’s interest and imagination, where nearly all rational thought ceases to exist.  It’s a totally different style of film, to be sure, yet it’s utterly captivating.  Handed a pair of 3D glasses when you enter the theater, yet a disclaimer opens the film, “This is NOT a 3D film, but please join our protagonist in putting the glasses on at the right moment.” 

Divided into two distinct halves, the summer and winter solstice, when the lead character enters a rundown movie theater about an hour into the film and puts on a pair of 3D glasses, the screen turns dark and the final hour officially begins, an enthralling interior venture into the unknown, introduced by the title sequence.  It should be said that the director’s first film was equally mesmerizing, 2016 Top Ten List #2 Kaili Blues (Lu bian ye can) (2015), and arguably more emotionally affecting, though the director was discouraged by the low-tech production values, featuring a remarkable 41-minute unbroken shot that is the centerpiece of that film, where most of it is shot outdoors from the back of a motorbike.  Both are moody and atmospheric memory plays where the past, the present, and an imagined future are seamlessly merged into an impressionistic mosaic that can’t distinguish between illusion and reality, where there’s little action to speak of, with the camera caught up in a stream-of-conscious mindset that silently observes the constantly shifting world around them, arriving unexpectedly at one place, eavesdropping on conversations, following compete strangers, as if on a whim, mysteriously intervening at times, retreating up and down a labyrinth of rocky stairs, where there is constant movement, yet the mood is defined by passivity, where a nocturnal dream language prevails.  Even in the opening, a voiceover narration reminds us that movies aren’t truthful, “The difference between films and memory is that films are always false,” as they’re based upon memories that are only partially truthful and partly made-up. 

Kaili is a place in the southwest of China known more for its mining industry than producing filmmakers, yet it is the home of the director and the setting for both his first two films, where the river and distant mountains are recognizable landmarks in each, also the rocky steps traversed by the camera that are used in each film.  One of the interesting cultural aspects is the presence of the Miao minority, who were openly featured in the first film, with Bi himself from the Miao minority, yet here their music has been integrated into the film, adding an unseen yet spiritual dimension, yet overall the wondrous musical score was written by Point Hsu and Giong Lim, Hou Hsaio-hsien’s musical composer since GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE (1996), now working with Jia Zhang-ke as well.  The film has an intoxicated air of steamy romanticism, using a film noir style protagonist who doubles as the narrator, like a 40’s film happening in the future, starring Huang Jue as Luo Hongwu returning back to his hometown of Kaili for the death of his father, recalling the lush visuals of Wong Kar-wai, one of the major revelations of the 90’s, also a prominent influence on 2016 Top Ten List #1 Moonlight by American director Barry Jenkins, as evidenced by a brief visual essay, Moonlight and Wong Kar-wai - YouTube (1:48).  It’s curious how nostalgia is evoked through period music, as Wong Kar-wai was notorious for his superb musical selection, Bi Gan, less so, showing a fascination for the music of pop singer Wu Bai, including 莫文蔚Karen Mok & 伍佰Wu Bai【堅強的理由Reason To Be Strong】我 ... YouTube (5:46), though his musical choices are less recognizable internationally, yet similarly ruminates on the past, routinely jumping back and forth in time, using names of characters in the film that are actual names of popular singers, though a running joke throughout the film is that they sound like the names of movie stars.  The device that sets the journey in motion is the removal of a clock on the wall, with Luo discovering an old photograph of a woman whose face has been burned away with a telephone number hidden in the back of the clock.  With this, the story begins in the sweltering heat, as we see the replacement of a lightbulb that is engulfed in a rain shower flooding the floor, where in a Tarkovsky motif, it appears to be raining indoors, as Kaili is a subtropical area where it often rains, especially during summer. 

“Everything began with the death of a friend,” recalling his childhood friend Wildcat (Lee Hong-chi) who ran up gambling debts he couldn’t pay back to a local gangster, ending up shot, his body found in an unused mine shaft.  Because of their connection he skipped town afterwards, looking back with regrets that he didn’t offer more help, eventually finding work as a casino manager.  Emerging from his past is Wan Qiwen, Tang Wei from Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (Se, jie) (2007), the beautiful femme fatale in a strikingly alluring green dress.  When he says she looks familiar, she has none of it, calling his bluff, initially treating him with disdain, as she’s the girl of a crime boss, though later, like fractured memories, replaying the scene in different circumstances, she suggests it reminds her of a line from one of his stories in the green book he carries around with him.  Actually this book, along with several other collected items along the way (like in a treasure hunt), have magical properties, which only begins to describe the shifting moods that viewers encounter throughout, as it has the feel of an Odysseus-like mythological journey.  The production values are exponentially improved in this film, receiving a much bigger budget and an international crew from the likes of prominent filmmakers Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wang Xiaoshuai, and Wong Kar-wai.  Using three cinematographers, he started with Yao Hung-I shooting the first part, working for several months before he had to return to Taiwan, taken over by Dong Jingsong, who shot Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bai ri yan huo) (2014), with French cinematographer David Chizallet who shot Mustang (2015) concluding the final 3D shot.  These technical improvements elevate the lush visual design of the film to otherworldly heights, infinitely better than Gaspar Noé’s ENTER THE VOID (2009), literally transcending the artform, where stylistically this is one of the most accomplished films seen in years, where you’d have to go back to 2015 Top Ten List #9 The Assassin (Nie Yinniang) to find a more visually extravagant film. 

 

“Fragmented memories, are they real or not?”  The director intercuts Luo’s search for Wan with pieces of her whereabouts, mixing time spans, where her identity keeps changing over time, becoming fixated on a mythical idealization of the perfect woman who always remains in the past, with Wan seen only in flashbacks, finding them in the midst of a torrid love affair while also retracing his steps in pursuit of her, where the black hair of his youth is replaced by a more grizzled looking gray, visiting Wildcat’s mother (the illustrious Sylvia Chang), whose family restaurant has now closed, leading to a woman’s prison to see a friend of Wan’s (Bi Yanmin), showing her the photograph, instantly recounting their involvement together in petty crimes where only the prisoner was caught.  In one of the more unforgettable scenes, Luo approaches a beauty salon, viewing the proprietor playing a video arcade game of Dance Dance Revolution set to the throbbing music of Vengaboys - We like to Party! (The Vengabus) – YouTube (3:44), with the music providing an exhilarating rush of adrenaline.  While all the scenes with Wan are flashbacks, there are no sexy scenes together, as we’re never in the “now” of the moment, always dealing with the implications, their shared secrets, such as an aborted pregnancy (where he vows to teach their new child how to play ping pong), as she’s connected to a karaoke-obsessed crime boss Zuo Hongyan (Chen Yongzhong, the director’s uncle, who starred in his previous film), where they dream of escaping to Macao, telling him she’s thought this through many times before, but rejected it, as Zuo has promised to track her down, leaving her no possibility of escape.  She was the one who told him the story of the legendary green book, leaving it with him as they make their plans which never materialize.  Later he expounds on reacting to stress, suggesting one response is eating an entire apple, including the core, with the director driving the point home with a shot of Wildcat eating an entire apple.  In an abandoned hotel, Luo thinks he’s tracked her down, only to discover she was once a tenant there, but when she ran out of money she started telling him stories, later becoming his wife.  Now long divorced, the man confesses, “She was such a good storyteller, I couldn’t tell what was real and what was fake.” 

Searching through the demolished ruins in the hills above Kaili for a female karaoke singer who might be Wan Qiwen, performances don’t start for an hour, so he whiles away his time in the seedy theater, with the rest a singular dream, shot entirely in the dark of night, all captured in a single unedited shot, as we soon find ourselves in the cavernous dark of a murky cave lit by an oil lamp, most likely the same mine shaft where Wildcat was found, where he’s surprised by a precocious young boy who claims he lives there (Luo Feiyang), who could be a younger resurrected version of Wildcat, but who could also be the son he imagined having with Wan Qiwen, as he’s quickly challenged to a game of ping pong by the young upstart, promising to show Luo the way out if he wins, which he does masterfully by utilizing the spin serve, which completely catches the kid by surprise.  Hopping a ride on his motorbike, he takes him to a cliff edge, taking a zip-line aerial wire to the other side, landing just outside a pool hall, introducing himself to the female manager, Kaizhen (also Tang Wei in a retro hairstyle), feeling a close connection, but she coldly tells him to get lost, “I’m not the woman you think I am.”  Yet he persists, challenging the young punks at the pool table who are bothering her to scram and get lost if he makes a combination shot (if he misses, that master shot must restart!).  When they find themselves locked inside, as the punks grabbed and threw away the key, Luo resorts to magic, twirling the ping pong paddle given to him earlier by the young kid which allows them to fly, a unique theatrical sensation, finding their way to the outdoor karaoke bar, set in a haphazard carnivalesque atmosphere with a ticket counter and food items on display, where a scant crowd is sitting around, barely paying any attention.  Luo gets sidetracked by a mysterious woman carrying a torch of fire (Sylvia Chang again, this time in a red wig), wandering through the outskirts of town and back again, catching up to Kaizhen in a backstage dressing room, the final act on the program ending just before dawn, finding themselves having a moment, getting reacquainted, taking a walk, landing in the hollowed out remains of his old home, where legend allows the house to spin if he recites the right words of poetry, sharing a kiss, becoming a visually transfixing moment, with viewers sharing an artist’s meticulously choreographed visualization of cinema exploring the empty spaces of a dream.  Despite a carry-over of similar themes from his previous movie, nonetheless no one expected a film of this magnitude, bravely providing fertile territory for new growth, cleverly utilizing 3D as a parallel state of consciousness, a hidden world complete with its own magical secrets, a shock to the senses, reminiscent to inhabiting the wondrous imagination of Gabriel García Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude for the very first time.