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.  

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

 

Director Kogonada

Kogonada with Colin Ferrell

Kogonada and Ferrell with Margot Robbie

A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY                 B+                                                      Ireland  USA  (108 mi)  2025  d: Kogonada

This is the first day of my life
Swear I was born right in the doorway
I went out in the rain, suddenly everything changed
They’re spreading blankets on the beach

Yours was the first face that I saw
I think I was blind before I met you
And I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where I’ve been
But I know where I want to go

Bright Eyes, First Day of My Life, 2005, Bright Eyes - First Day of My Life [Official Music Video] YouTube (3:06)

The most hilariously playful of the essayist-turned-filmmaker Kogonada films, which would include the ravishingly beautiful naturalism of 2017 Top Ten List #5 Columbus and the sci-fi world of artificial intelligence in After Yang (2021), where the tagline of this film is:  What if you could open a doorway and walk through it to re-live a defining moment from your past?  While the release has been postponed several times, the first film Kogonada neither wrote nor edited, it has taken an avalanche of negative criticism, with some suggesting it’s among the worst films of the year, even described as a bomb, yet this is nothing as they describe, instead it’s actually a weirdly fascinating, fun experience, clever and insightful, absurdist in its own way, where it takes us down a rabbit hole, much like Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau) (1974), while it also recalls the romantic time traveling escapades of Bertrand Bonello’s 2024 Top Ten List #9 The Beast (La Bête), Charlie Kaufman’s I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020), or Robert Schwentke’s The Time Traveler's Wife (2009), while also reminiscent of the quirky romantic journey of Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer (2009), a throwback to the whimsical comedy of Zach Braff’s GARDEN STATE (2004), or even the disoriented editing structure of Charlie Kaufmann and Michel Gondry’s ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004).  In other words, despite what disparaging critics have suggested, this is not a waste of time, but a bonanza of riches, a romantic fantasy filled with moments of joy, but also major disappointments, as it excruciatingly examines the flawed lives of two people who are single, filled with regrets, missed opportunities, and the trauma of bad relationships, which is part of the baggage we all carry and what makes us who we are, magically making them come together through a kind of ingeniously clever, futuristic matchmaking service, where there’s a humanizing beauty to be had in their shared moments together.  Korean-American filmmaker Kogonada’s birth name is Park Joong Eun, where his professional name was derived from renowned Japanese auteur Yasujirō Ozu’s longtime screenwriter Kogo Noda, and what we know is that he’s developed a reputation for the unconventional.  Perhaps the biggest surprise is the film’s musical score is written by Joe Hisaishi, who is best known for his collaborations with Studio Ghibli Japanese anime director Hayao Miyazaki, the maker of such enchanting films like MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (1988), PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997), SPIRITED AWAY (2001), HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE (2004), and more recently The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) (2014) and The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka) (2023), where this marks the celebrated composer's first score outside of Japan, adding a touch of magic to the experience.  There’s nothing quite like this in any of the year’s movie releases, where the uniqueness of the subject matter, beautifully realized by screenwriter Seth Reiss, a former head writer for the irreverent, satirical publication The Onion and on the staff of Late Night with Seth Meyers, becomes a cause for celebration.  While deeply felt and understated, this may not be as intellectually challenging as the filmmaker’s earlier work, but it is lighter and infinitely more entertaining, revealing a side we haven’t really seen before, literally swooning with romanticism, where these big name Hollywood actors are an absolute delight in something less mainstream and more offbeat, and while the protagonist’s problems aren’t exactly so earthshaking that it requires divine intervention, like George Bailey in Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946), the solution does appear to be driven by the transformative power of love. 

Carrying over the married couple actors from his previous film, including the artistically stunning, visually dazzling cinematography by Benjamin Loeb, employing a vivid color palette, while adding a few new surprises, the unusually versatile Colin Ferrell stars as David, a single man with a perpetually lonely soul, yet he’s completely relatable as someone we might have known, smart, imaginative, yet not exactly socially engaging, typically keeping to himself, where he doesn’t easily make connections.  When his car is booted for parking issues, in desperation he turns to a rental car agency specializing in emergencies since 1994, whose homemade flyer advertisement is seen posted on a wall directly in front of his car, including a phone number and a mysterious broken heart.  Arriving in this immense warehouse that is completely dark except for an illuminated card table on the far side, like a football field away, where two people sit under a giant sign that says The Rental Car Agency – none other than Kevin Kline (you have to do a double take to realize that’s him) and a German-accented Phoebe Waller-Bridge who relishes the use of the word “fuck,” whose surreal personalities are oddly eccentric, characters you might find in a Monty Python movie, not at all what he expects, as it plays out like an audition, where they already have a professional headshot photo of him, a picture David has never seen before, informing him “Sometimes we have to perform to get to the truth,” so none of this makes sense.  He’s also a bit surprised that the only cars offered are two identical 1994 Saturn SL’s, which are no longer in operation, yet there they are, and while he’s flummoxed by the bizarre way the car agent’s communicate, almost like robotic AI versions of themselves, insisting there’s only one right answer to all his inquiries, nonetheless he’s persuaded to purchase the accompanying GPS, which the car didn’t originally have in the pre-internet era, with no outlets for a phone, complete with an animated screen.  As it turns out, that GPS is a major character in the film, seemingly omniscient and all-knowing, with a cryptic voice offering advice that goes well beyond navigational directions, voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith, with David seen in the car on the road happily belting out one of the songs from the musical A Chorus Line while he drives to a wedding, A Chorus Line (1985) - One Scene (8/8) | Movieclips YouTube (4:09), not the norm, for sure, yet it exudes pizzazz from the hidden regions of his less than dynamic personality.  Upon arrival at the wedding in the pouring rain, taking place in a hotel called La Strada (after the Fellini film), all the guests are handed Jacques Demy The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) umbrellas for an outdoor service (just a few of the many cinematic cues referenced), where David looks across the aisle to see a woman looking back at him, Margot Robbie as Sarah, where the pair briefly engages in conversation afterwards.  He’s more reserved and shy, quietly haunted by regrets and unresolved relationships, while she’s more of a free spirit, where her cheerful exterior hides the vulnerability and deep turmoil within, as both are unhappily single, where neither is the person they would like to be, but they are so emotionally guarded that they’d rather ignore any obvious attraction to avoid the risk of getting hurt, so the encounter ends awkwardly, seemingly built on self-deprecating declarations, but nothing becomes of it before going their separate ways.  Instead, on the road afterwards, the GPS informs him of an upcoming spot to stop for a fast food burger.  Incredulously, Sarah is there as well, coming over to share a table with David, where they realize each is driving the exact same vintage Saturn, quickly assessing that this is more than mere coincidence.  Confessing a few personal secrets about themselves, their fears, their insecurities, and their fear of commitment, discovering both have been disappointed in relationships, they decide to continue the journey together, but only after Sarah’s car fails to start, so they really have no other choice, turning into a road trip that is partly a journey down memory lane and partly a spiritual awakening.   

Literally thrown in each other’s laps, it all seems designed by a higher power, embarking on a fantastical, magical mystery tour together, where the GPS leads them to a series of mysterious doors in the middle of nowhere as open portals to another dimension that allows them to revisit key moments of their past, like a lighthouse in Canada that may or may not have led to a personal epiphany for David, or an art museum that Sarah used to visit with her equally free spirited mother, developing a trusting relationship with the guard who let them in after hours when the museum is completely dark, so these are memorable places, holding a very special significance in their lives, perhaps the source of their negative views of themselves.  They connect on an existential level, both very self-aware, digging into who they are and how they got to be that way, happier alone than in the company of others, yet that is equally frustrating, challenged by their own unique limitations, as a dark cloud seems to hover over each of them, stymied by an inability to connect with others, yet visiting these doors is a bit like dating, as the accumulation of knowledge and the discovery of new possibilities is essential.  When another door leads to David’s high school, seeing him as a teenager while viewers see him as an adult, the film explodes into a full-blown musical, as David has the role of J. Pierrepont Finch in the Pulitzer prize-winning musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, suddenly finding himself performing onstage just after the girl of his dreams rejects him, breaking out into a song and dance, with Sarah, who is a musical junkie, howling with delight in the audience, A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY – Exclusive 6 Minute Scene YouTube (6:24).  It all feels cathartic, like this has a chance to change their future in some mysterious way, but neither one seems able to find that key, still locked in the past with no way out, where there’s a beautiful balance between cynicism and hope, as each one gets stuck in their own personal trauma, trying to reach out, but get blocked by their preconceptions, which has a way of bulldozing their hopes and dreams.  The filmmaker has a blast just visualizing this succession of doors, like one of their destinations where Sarah and David climb a hill that incredulously offers them a view of Earth from space.  With each passing door comes new revelations about a crucial event in each other’s lives that provides greater understanding into their character.  There’s an Alice in Wonderland innocence and naïveté about this, as these kinds of literary efforts are usually young people or teenagers passing through a phase into adulthood, but these are adults reverting back to their childhoods, seemingly rewiring the circuitry, but neither one is brave enough to reach out to the other, as they seem to need an extra boost to appreciate their own lives.  Perhaps the most therapeutic sequences are surreal and intoxicating moments where David is transported back to a hospital in Ireland on the day he was born where he’s anonymously able to encourage his own reticent father as a younger man (Hamish Linklater), while Sarah visits her ailing mother (Lily Rabe, daughter of actress Jill Clayburgh - - cool how the parents are partners in real life) in the hospital on the day she dies of cancer, a woman who sacrificed everything to give her daughter a good life, finally sharing that poignant moment together that they were never able to actually experience, offering some kind of corrective.  There’s a weirdly amusing, phantasmagorical nature to the entire experience, beautifully rendered, with just a touch of the right serious note, but as soon as we hear the sounds of Bright Eyes - First Day of My Life [Official Music Video] YouTube (3:06), we know we’re immersed in a whimsical theatrical journey brimming with optimism, given that distinct indie film vibe.   Kogonada is known for his distinctive style and philosophical themes, as the film explores the possibility of restoring belief in love and the potential to overcome cynicism as one gets older, overcoming that creeping doubt that lingers, where there’s a wonderful turn in one of the more dramatic scenes with Mitski’s rendition of Peter Townsend’s seminal song, Let My Love Open the Door | A Big Bold Beautiful Journey ... YouTube (2:43), which seems to be the missing key of the entire film, allowing them to begin anew, their lives forever altered, offering just a hint of hope that despite all obstacles, there is a pathway to a brighter future.  If you stay until the end of the closing credits, which features a breakthrough dance sequence, the last sound we hear are feet approaching a door that closes shut, suggesting the journey is now complete.  While it may not be what some people have come to expect, it does exude charm, feeling like the perfect antidote for these politically chaotic and overly traumatic times.