Walk Up (Tab)

 

Writer/director Hong Sang-soo

WALK UP (Tab)        B                                                                                                           South Korea  (97 mo)  2022  d: Hong Sang-soo

A minimalist, architectural story from Hong Sang-soo, yet another example of just how unique and original an artist he is, a rejection of the norms that dictate what movies should be and how they get made, as this is a truly different kind of movie, modest in scope, even for him, yet emblematic of a “post-political” Korea.  In this case, the most prominent character is a building, comprised of four floors, each containing a different chapter of the story, focusing on its exploration of a film director's life through a four-story building in Seoul, where the film utilizes the vertical structure to explore relationships and shifting realities, with the changing floors evoking progressions in time, as the lives of four women intersect and weave together like parallel worlds, but is actually an infinite exploration towards the everyday, seen from a variety of prisms that connect in a terribly intimate way, either in the most emotional aspect or in the purely cinematic, where it’s hard to decipher just what’s going on here, as time advances unknowingly between episodes, making large, unexpected leaps in chronology, where much of what happens takes place offscreen, with viewers hard-pressed to comprehend what’s transpired in the unseen, empty spaces in between.  In fact, the only way to know we’re advancing to a new chapter is the guitar music interlude, or maybe it’s a mandolin, composed by the director himself, who once again writes, directs, edits, films, and produces this film, which is shot in high contrast black and white.  Celebrated for its signature minimalist style, painting a poetic and intimate portrait of the daily life of a building populated by artists, the film explores art, memory, and aging, with the passage of time becoming a significant aspect, as perspectives change over time.  Kwon Hae-hyo is acclaimed director Byung-soo, often seen as a stand-in for Hong himself, completely recognizable in his ninth film with the director, where the actor openly acknowledges his working method, “the key is not to prepare anything.”  He arrives with his estranged adult daughter Jeong-su (Park Mi-so), who is an aspiring interior decorator, at a building greeted by an old friend, who is the building owner, Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-young), but also well established in the designer field.  She gives them a tour of the property, which includes a restaurant and cooking studio on the first two floors, her office in the basement, a residence on the third floor, and an artist’s studio on the top filled with abstract paintings, which she generously offers to the director, as the current occupant, a painter, has run out of funds to pay rent.  They catch up over a bottle of wine, but Byung-soo leaves for an important meeting at his film office nearby, leaving Jeong-su alone with Ms. Kim to discuss her ambitions, which sound earnest enough, hoping to work as her apprentice, though it remains questionable whether she’s really serious enough, instead confessing thoughts about her filmmaking father, “He’s well known outside, but to me he’s completely different.  People have no idea.  People admire my dad because of his image as a film director.”  Ms. Kim perceptively responds, “We’re all different when we go out, we’re different inside and outside.  Maybe the person he is when he’s outside is more genuine.”

If, as Jeong-su suggests, you cannot get the whole picture of a person like her father merely from watching his films, then the same is likely to be true of Hong.  While his films are intimate, loosely autobiographical portraits of the director, they are also inevitably oblique, distorted, and incomplete, becoming more experimental of late, as the narrative advances with almost imperceptible variations, leaving viewers to make of it what they will, where there is always drunkenness and people who smoke excessively.  The second chapter takes place on the second floor where Byung-soo and Ms. Kim dine in the tiny restaurant with the cook, Sun-hee (Song Seon-mi), a former painter who admires his films, informing him, “There’s a lot of talking in your films, but the dialogue never rubs me the wrong way,” explaining further that she finds them laugh out loud funny, and easy to drink to, yet because they’re so talky, “They make me feel less lonely.”  Byung-soo sadly informs them that his new oversees project that he had been working on for the last year was just rejected by his investors three weeks before shooting was set to begin, claiming films spend so much money on needless things, that it’s all about the money to them instead of making the best film, as they will never understand true artistic vision, thinking it’s all such a waste, that it’s a business model destined to fail.  This failure is mirrored by Ms. Kim acknowledging that Jeong-su was hired as her apprentice, but she left suddenly without a word before the first month had passed, with reverberations spreading like waves, as now the father and daughter are no longer on speaking terms.  These incidents reveal the temporality of things, like the changing seasons, where our understanding of the things that matter to us require viewpoint shifts and quick adaptation.  The more they drink a more palpable attraction builds between Byung-soo and Sun-hee, exchanging mutual admiration, and they remain together in the third chapter, with Byung-soo moving in to the third floor with her, but by now he’s experiencing health issues, growing concerned about his diet, trying to eliminate meat and eat healthier.  Sun-hee cares for him and at first they seem happy together, but there are signs that something is not right.  The ceiling is leaking (like something out of Tsai Ming-liang), yet their landlord, Ms. Kim, doesn’t appear concerned.  While she once salivated at the opportunity of such an esteemed artist living in her building, but Byung-soo’s career has taken a nosedive, apparently affecting his health, and Ms. Kim now feels burdened by his presence, routinely entering without permission, or opening his mail, and only grows more pathetic over time.  What was once a charming space now feels oppressive and claustrophobic, with the world closing in.  As he scales the building, floor by floor, story by story, we see a director age and become unwell, curling up in bed in a fetal position, where a a voiceover incident takes place in his head that may take place in the future or may be pure fantasy, as Byung-soo now starts to think he’d be better off alone, dreaming of making films on Jeju Island.

Next time we see him, he is living in an artist’s studio on the rooftop floor upstairs with yet another woman, Ji-young, (Cho Yun-hee), an emotionally supportive and motherly real estate agent who brings meat to grill and soju to drink, while also getting wild ginseng root preserved in honey, valued for their medicinal properties, which she offers to heal whatever is ailing him.  They eat on the outdoor balcony with a view overlooking the city, a quality that initially attracted the director to choosing this building to live, as it definitely has an aesthetic quality that would be pleasing to any artist.  Byung-soo has aged significantly, though we have no idea how much time has passed.  There are several moments when viewers can’t tell if Byung-soo is dreaming or if it is real, as scenes are narrated as he sleeps, or a text is dictated in his head as it is being composed.  In a carry-over from the earlier chapter, the roof still leaks and the toilet does not work, creating a sizable problem, yet all that seems to matter to Ms. Kim is that he changed the password to his electric door entry keypad (a familiar sound we keep hearing), as she took such great pride that the previous tenant kept his door unlocked.  Using structure as a focal point, each new chapter adds a deeper, more personal layer to the multi-talented artist who oversees nearly every aspect of its production, with echoes of multiple meanings where people connect or not with one another, reflective of the director’s own understanding, his desire, his empathy, and his curiosity, which sometimes provokes anger, regret, and rejection.  Time and time again, Hong uses a certain familiarity with his stable of actors in combination with the film’s plot device to bring out deeper, underlying aspects of the story, with an absence of any explanation or character psychology.  Byung-soo is, after all, a film director, so the unearthed revelations about him, as conversations move toward discussions of fandom, legacy, image, perception, or craft, lead to indications or clues about Hong’s true feelings on the subjects.  This is true about all his films going back to the mid 90’s, where there is virtually no beginning and no end to the list of possible entry points into the auteur’s filmography, as it really doesn’t matter, as each can stand on its own, yet all his films exist in conversation with one another, where it helps to be well-versed in the Hong Sang-soo aesthetic to appreciate what this film is doing, as it retraces where he’s been and offers insight into where he’s heading.  It doesn’t have the quirky fun of another film that lets the imagination go wild in imagining what transpires in the room of a house, that becomes a writing exercise in François Ozon’s In the House (Dans La Maison) (2012), which is more brilliantly inventive, instead this is more subdued, elusive, and ambiguously hard to read, where it’s remarkable what you can do in a small space, though nothing of any real interest happens, filling the spaces with an outpouring of everyday details spanning art, love, career, religion, dietary decisions, and home renovations, but it represents a tender journey through different stages of the director’s life with an open-ended honesty that is uniquely this artist’s own. 

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.