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.  

Materialists

 

Writer/director Celine Song

director on the set with Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans

director with Dakota Johnson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MATERIALISTS       C+                                                                                                           USA  Finland  (117 mi)  2025  d: Celine Song

Marriage is a business deal and it always has been.                                                                    —Lucy (Dakota Johnson)

From the maker of the highly celebrated Past Lives (2023), a smaller, indie-styled film that brought intelligence and a melancholic intimacy to the immigrant experience, yet this is a complete turnaround from that, where you wonder what this director had in mind, opting for a lightweight, mainstream romance comedy that veers from sheer fantasy to darker realities, never really distinguishing itself in any way, with no real likeable characters except a rather unremarkable down-and-out actor whose career is stalled, with the world seemingly passing him by, yet he’s at least identifiable.  The way the film plays out, it’s his very ordinariness that stands out, offering a distinctive appeal that no other character has, as he’s relatable and more openly human.  The other characters, not so much, feeling like they exist in some fantasy world, like an extension of the artificiality of Greta Gerwig’s BARBIE (2023), where love is callously viewed as a business transaction.  The film invests a lot of energy developing that theme, luring us into a world where money makes everything better, where the luxuries of life are equated with success and the American Dream, making the subjects feel like they are finally worthy of love, which is all a rather pretentiously ridiculous entry into the world of romance, like it’s part of a capitalist realization, holding up a mirror to just how shallow we are as a society, with the explosion of social media becoming increasingly calculating and crudely insensitive, extending a social class prejudice that without money love doesn’t exist.  This, of course, only exists in the world of movies, which is notoriously described as a dream machine.  So right from the outset it’s hard to get behind this movie, which isn’t that different from Sean Baker’s Academy Award-winning Anora (2024), which also equated love with money and success.  Once money is removed from the situation, love dies like a house of cards, sending characters into a tailspin of emotional turmoil.  So apparently this is the current fascination of Hollywood, (The Rise of the Anti-Cinderella Story).  What message this conveys about real life is hard to measure, as these feel like exaggerated circumstances that bear no resemblance to the lives we are actually living, unlike the satirical comedies of Roy Andersson, for instance, whose SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000) and YOU, THE LIVING (2007) bring a Kafkaesque absurdity to the forefront of the living, accentuating the absurd and comical elements of simple everyday situations.  But that’s not what this is, as it feels wrapped in a consumerist paradise on display, where monetary value is equated with human value, which is ethically problematic.  But in this case, the title says it all, as it means what it says.  As a playwright, Song has an ear for dialogue, but the relatively bland characters continually utter what sounds like scripted dialogue that feels superficially one-dimensional, where you wonder what really drew the filmmaker to this insipid material, though one should never underestimate the importance of romance.  In a different era any film posing the question whether to marry for love or for money would have been relegated to a Chick flick, a notoriously derogatory term, played for a healthy mix of laughs and sex appeal in Howard Hawks’ star-driven cinematic spectacle of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), or any Judy Holliday movie from the same time period.  While there are some interesting musical choices, like Baby Rose singing a soulful classic at a wedding that has been covered by many jazz and blues artists since the 50’s, That's All YouTube (3:26), Marc Webb’s much more inventive and better acted (500) Days of Summer (2009) blows this out of the water.  Watching people fall in love is a lost art in contemporary movies, as they began to disappear from theaters as soon as people started calling them rom-coms, (Where Have Rom-Coms Gone? (And Our Nostalgic ...), now lost in the rush to produce huge blockbusters, often premiering on streaming platforms. 

Opening in a strange prelude sequence that makes us feel that we’re in another movie, it’s a story of first love in an era of cavemen during the Stone Age, something of a stretch in conceiving an Adam and Eve scenario of the first humans to fall in love, but we’re quickly rushed back into the present as we’re introduced to Lucy (Dakota Johnson, daughter of actor Don Johnson and actress Melanie Griffith), an extremely successful matchmaker for a high-end dating service whose latest couples pairing success is her 9th marriage, receiving applause and adulation from her coworkers at Adore Matchmaking, a Manhattan-based company that strives to bring couples together, suggesting they will find the right partner – for a price.  Dating apps, or in this case matchmaking services, lead to people buying and trading themselves like merchandise, ostensibly designed to make things easier, but the reality is much darker and more complicated.  Shot on 35mm by Shabier Kirchner, who also shot her earlier film, this bears some resemblance to Elizabeth Lo’s Chinese documentary Mistress Dispeller (2024), as the director draws from personal experience working for 6 months as a professional matchmaker a decade ago for exclusively affluent people in order to fund her writing career, but this feels more fantasy based, as everything revolves around money, suggesting love can be bought and customized, with clients making ridiculously precise, superficial specifications of exactly what they are looking for, like picking out a house or a piece of furniture.  At the wedding of her latest success story, she repeats the mantra, “Who our partner is determines our whole life,” before meeting the brother of the groom, Harry (Pedro Pascal), an extravagantly wealthy financial capitalist who represents the pinnacle of success, the ultimate “catch,” described in the business as a unicorn, supposedly everything any woman could dream of, intelligent, tall, handsome, and filthy rich, checking all the boxes, as they say.  While he overhears her sales pitch while passing out business cards, he expresses a genuine interest in meeting her, but she defers, suggesting he pursue romantic prospects through Adore, hoping he will find the perfect match.  While they are flirting, however, in something of a comical surprise, Lucy runs into her more disheveled ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), working as a server at the wedding, bringing her drink of choice, where it’s clear they have a history together.  A struggling actor, he’s looking for extra income, as we quickly learn that their relationship fizzled due to money concerns when both were struggling actors, a dream he has continued to pursue, though he still doesn’t have a manager, won’t take commercial jobs, yet is upset with the way his life has turned out.   In stark contrast is another one of Lucy’s long-time clients, Sophie (Zoë Winters), who has repeatedly struck out in the dating game, becoming a seemingly hopeless case, with Adore, supposedly experts in achieving that perfect match, discovering it’s very difficult to find the man of her dreams, privately asserting “There’s no place in the market for her.”  When Lucy sets her up with that perfect date, he ends up sexually assaulting her in what amounts to date rape, a disastrous turn of events that precipitates a lawsuit against the company, where it’s clear these are lives that are being toyed with.  Despite the background checks and aligning all the perfect algorithms, occasionally a dark and sinister character slips through, inflicting enormous damage, as Sophie’s self-esteem plummets, leaving her emotionally and psychologically devastated, feeling permanently scarred, yet the company doesn’t like to talk about failures, as it’s all about conveying success to a public that needs to believe in dreams.  What’s clear at the outset is how the company views relationships as assets and liabilities, suggesting dating is a calculated risk, like a financial investment, so what this film really lacks is the personal intimacy created in Song’s earlier film.  

With that in mind, Lucy starts dating Harry on her own, where, exactly like Anora, she’s quickly won over by the massive scale of his financial success, living in a $12 million dollar Tribeca penthouse while leading an immensely privileged lifestyle, showing impeccable taste, regularly taking her to all the upscale expensive restaurants that most people can only afford on special occasions, becoming a whirlwind affair of glamor and indulgence, just like the man of her dreams.  While everything points to that perfect Prince Charming Hollywood scenario playing out before our eyes, the director suddenly subverts those expectations, pulling the rug out from under us and chooses to go in a different direction, with the film getting messier and more complicated, as it turns out she doesn’t really love her perfect match, while he himself may be incapable of love, refusing to allow himself to be exposed to that degree of emotional vulnerability.  It’s all about success, pressing the right buttons, making all the right decisions to maintain his quality of life, which he values more than anything else, even her.  While this may come as something as a surprise, the real surprise was seeing walkouts when viewers were disappointed to discover this was not a happily-ever-after storybook ending, suggesting viewer expectation plays a large role in this film, as it doesn’t follow the script, veering off on an unexpected tangent, as she breaks up with Harry, only to find herself evaluating her own life, spending more time with John, who lives that typical working class life where daily frustrations play into what he’s constantly forced to deal with, yet he’s maintained a certain trust with Lucy even after their breakup, never actually falling out of love with her, offering a sympathetic ear whenever she needs it.  As fate would have it, she sublets her apartment for a week as she was planning to be whisked off to Iceland with Harry before they amicably broke things off, leaving her stranded, without a place to stay, but John’s multiple roommates live in apartment squalor, so that’s not really an option, instead they head on an upstate road excursion together in his beat-up Volvo, where they spontaneously crash a wedding staged at an outdoor countryside barn, suddenly taking themselves more seriously, finally asking those existential questions, like are they really back together again.  In the end, not sure it actually matters, as the soulless characters display no actual chemistry onscreen and are simply not compelling enough for us to care, where it all seems to play out in a land of make believe, where the materialistic view of life is just as much of a scam as the Prince Charming view of romance, with marriage viewed as a means to climb the social ladder, exactly as it was back in the days of Jane Austen novels.  On the day before the film release, the director provided a “movie syllabus” list of films that influenced the making of the film, many of which go back to the 80’s and 90’s, most likely films the director grew up watching, Materialists movie syllabus via Celine - A24 - X, but this feels more like the escapist television series Sex and the City than any of those referenced films, which conspicuously leaves out Susan Sandler’s play turned into her own film adaptation in Joan Micklin Silver’s CROSSING DELANCEY (1988), where it would be easy to imagine Kate Hudson, Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, or Rachel McAdams inhabiting this role with similar results, though it does attempt to get under the surface.  Arguably the best scene is the closing credits sequence, a long, well-choreographed final shot that exudes personality and diversity, topped off by a wonderfully quirky John Prine song, originally written for Billy Bob Thornton’s DADDY AND THEM (2001), but featuring a superb rendition with Iris DeMent, John Prine and Iris DeMent - In Spite of Ourselves (Live From ... YouTube (5:04).