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.  

The Wild Goose Lake (Nan Fang Che Zhan De Ju Hui)

Director Diao Yinan

THE WILD GOOSE LAKE (Nan Fang Che Zhan De Ju Hui)         B                    

China  France  (110 mi)  2019  d: Diao Yinan

The long awaited follow-up to Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bai ri yan huo) (2014), a wintry film noir that took place in the northernmost icy region of China bordering on Russia, while this takes place in the sweltering heat of Wuhan Province in central China, feeling more like the lush, tropical setting of Wong Kar-wai, with the constant rain, neon colors, and noirish aesthetics producing haunting images of rare beauty, much of it due to cinematographer Dong Jingsong who also shot Bi Gan’s Long Day's Journey Into Night (Di qiu zui hou de ye wan) (2019).  More of an open tribute to genre films, with the title emblematic of “a wild goose chase,” this heavily stylized film features plenty of action in an ultra-moody, hyper-violent gangland thriller, much of it told in flashback, more often than not producing unexpected results, becoming something of a crowd pleaser.  At the outset, under a torrential rain, Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge) is a man alone at a railway station, on the run from police, smoking a cigarette while waiting under the overhang until a mysterious woman arrives, Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun-mei), asking for a light.  This existential backdrop immediately sets the stage for film noir territory, kicking in an obligatory flashback sequence, yet it’s the last time anything will be remotely clear in this visually extravagant cops and robber caper.  Recently released from prison, the tight-lipped Zhou finds himself in a hotel basement meeting of rival motorcycle gangs discussing how they’re dividing up the territory, which gets hotly contested by the volatile Crazy Cat Brothers, breaking out into a fight, where a temporary truce is established, but only on the condition that the opposing sides accept a challenge, whoever steals the most motorcycles in a set period of time is declared the winner (“an Olympic Games of theft”) and awarded the coveted territory in dispute.  Unbeknownst to Zhou, the Brothers cut a deal behind the scenes and sabotage Zhou’s gang with a surprise attack, turning into a demolition derby of swerving motorbikes, decapitating one of his riders, chasing Zhou down as well, trying to kill him, but he accidentally kills a cop while evading the chase, making him the target of a nationwide police manhunt.  Liao Fan, from the director’s earlier film and Jia Zhang-ke’s Ash Is Purest White (Jiang hu er nv) (2018), plays the Police Chief, seen in a room filled with cops drawing up his capture strategy (mirroring the outlaw convention), with cops initially posing as a motorcycle gang, but who are they fooling?  The underworld also joins the chase, hoping to collect the sizeable reward, yet the confounding aspect is that the outlaw claims he wants to turn himself in so his estranged wife Shujun (Wan Qian, aka: Regina Wan), who he hasn’t seen in five years, can get the reward, yet his hellraising Billy the Kid instincts say otherwise.            

In what is largely a slow-paced film, the director ratchets up the adrenaline in the high-speed action scenes with a flurry of frenetic violence, yet the plot is cluttered with continual side trips that can feel distracting, delving into contending rivalries from secondary characters, never really developing the lead characters, who remain isolated and aloof, without much insight into their past history.  While kind of an underwhelming, one-note screenplay, the set design is extraordinary, finding shabby, dilapidated sites with crumbling rooms in a deteriorating bi-level apartment complex, back rooms of grungy restaurants, street vendors with a lone lightbulb hovering over their darkened stalls, or a room covered in newspapers and old photographs that seem to come to life, adding elements of originality that are tastefully inserted into this murky atmosphere of lingering chaos.  Zhou is laying low, needing a bullet removed from his shoulder (bleeding profusely throughout the entire picture), giving him time to contemplate his fate, yet despite his long absence, Zhou is thinking of the family he left behind.  Shujun, now raising a son, is unsure she really wants to get dragged back into his world again, harassed by police every step of the way.  When Liu Aiai convinces her to meet her husband in a public place, there are so many plain-clothed cops in the vicinity that every single person you see is suspect, erupting in pandemonium and violence, where they have to abort the plan and are lucky to escape unharmed, with Shujun refusing any more cooperation.  She is replaced by Liu Aiai, who has a history at Wild Goose Lake, where Zhou has retreated, as it’s a crowded tourist attraction where she works as a “bathing beauty,” slang for prostitutes on the beach in oversized wide-brimmed straw hats that take their customers out into the water for pleasuring.  The Chief gets word Zhou may be hiding there, organizing a large tactical unit, scouring the area with cops in civilian clothes who are stationed in every nook and cranny on the street, leaving little avenue for escape.  While it gets a bit ridiculous, considering Zhou is ostensibly trying to turn himself into police, and there is nowhere to turn where their presence can’t be seen, yet he hesitates, apparently thwarting even his own plans.  What’s uniquely different here is that there’s not even any pretense of romance, as that never enters into the picture, so any idea of a traditional femme fatale gets lost in the shadowy intrigue, as Liu Aiai is little more than a messenger, a go-between sending messages to the crime boss on the run, where he remains the central figure, occasionally exploding into action on a moment’s notice like a comic book super hero, undeterred by his injury, holding his own against a stream of pursuers, leading to plenty of close calls, but continuing to avoid detection. 

The fictitious Wild Goose Lake is considered gangland turf, so when the police infiltrate, there’s really little difference between them, as both represent an absence of morality, where fabricating lies or utilizing betrayal tactics are all too common, with both sides resorting to underhanded tactics, becoming a metaphor for moral rot, with pervasive lawlessness and shifting loyalties.  Interesting that in nearly all these settings a small TV can be seen in a corner of the room broadcasting the State news network, which includes regular updates on this police manhunt, even a planted story about the outlaw’s pregnant girlfriend, anything to draw him out into the open, though nothing seems to work, restricted to only moving at night, yet he continually slips past checkpoints.  With the camera following his every move, he’s highly adept at avoiding detection, continually briefed by Liu Aiai, including a poignant scene between them in a canoe on the lake late at night, which plays out like a calm before the storm.  The picture of China is one of pervasive criminality, where every storefront dive or food stall is a cover for police surveillance, offering a threat of imminent danger, where no one is safe from being a target.  In a world of constant betrayals and double-crosses, we never know who’s aligned with who in this constantly shifting moral void of deceit, where organized crime and law enforcement are one and the same, where everyone is viewed with suspicion as a potential threat to the state, all part of the excessive government overreach that dehumanizes the population.  God knows how many innocents were caught in the crossfires of this film, but no one seems to care.  The depiction of life on the margins in China is an unbroken pattern of betrayal and undermined aspirations, with nothing left to hope for, as all avenues are closed.  Fatalistic to the core, yet the director’s flamboyant visual style is on display, arguably the closest Chinese director to the Westernized standards of Hollywood, he takes B-movie elements and injects them with an arthouse sensibility, creating testosterone-driven shoot-outs that grow absurdly violent, especially given Zhou’s bleak circumstances, yet he has a tendency to rise from the dead with an explosive force of his own, veering into Takashi Miike territory, especially a cop impaled by an umbrella, blood splattering everywhere, where moments like this are the real driving interest in the film, contrasted with the supremely ridiculous music video image of dancers with neon-lit soles on their feet enjoying themselves at an outdoor dance party, all in choreographed formation to Boney M’s “Rasputin,” Boney M. - Rasputin - YouTube (4:43), until gunshots ring out and everyone scatters.  Arguably an exploration of toxic masculinity in such a patriarchal society, the opportunities for women are nonexistent, with Liu Aiai longing to escape her dead-end existence, Shujun is slaving away in a factory, where there is little sign of escape or independence, which is why the ending comes as a complete surprise, almost fairy tale in nature, as if the sun has finally come out, becoming an absurdist tale, finding optimism in the ashes of broken dreams.