Do you remember when we used to watch movies with the undivided attention we give to our dreams? Bi Gan, the Chinese director behind 2018’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” sure does. And so, seven years later, his return — or his “Resurrection” — arrives: a marvelously maximalist movie of opulent ambition that is actually five or six movies, each at once playful and peculiar and part of an overarchingly melancholy elegy for the dream of 20th-century cinema and the lives we lived within it.
It is, of course, a paradox to make a film that requires of the viewer the exact spirit of guileless abandon whose disappearance it is built to mourn. But then every moment of “Resurrection” exists on the pivot of a paradox, all of which have their origin in a fundamentally paradoxical premise: a near-future (which is maybe just a curt appraisal of our post-pandemic present) in which dreams are cinema and cinema is dreams, which is bad news for both because nobody dreams anymore.
Silent movie-style intertitles explain the almost comically unwieldy sci-fi basis, part “Stalker,” a dash of “Blade Runner,” all crazy, so here goes: Humankind has discovered the key to longevity is to stop dreaming – the analogy, that becomes one of the many motifs, is of a wax candle that can last forever if it is never lit. But there are some dissenters who would prefer to burn through shorter, brighter lives. Bi Gan, co-writing with Bai Xue, dubs these willful dreamers “Fantasmers,” and explains how dangerous they are, how they “bring chaos to history” and “make time jump.” And so there are other individuals, called “Big Others” who are gifted with the power to tell illusion from reality, and are sent to find the Fantasmers, who are holed up in their imaginary movie worlds, and to preserve the linearity of time by waking them up.
From the start, we are inside these nesting dream-state stories, each corresponding to a different, successive era of cinema, and each one also corresponding to one of the five senses. The silent-cinema-aping, sight-related first section functions as an introduction to the Fantasmer, played by Jackson Yee in all five of the character’s different incarnations, and his pursuing Big Other played by Shu Qi, resplendent in a high-necked silk blouse of a color that, after Tang Wei’s dress in “Long Day’s Journey” should hereafter be dubbed “Bi Gan green.”
This section is also the most exquisite showcase of Liu Qiang and Tu Nan’s baroquely ornamented production design, as this time the Fantasmer is an outright movie monster, a kind of Nosferatu-meets-Quasimodo, and the world he is hiding in is like an ornate dollhouse diorama of a chinese opium den, complete with stop-motion wood-cut puppets in the background. But turning a corner, it is now a German expressionist maze of canted angles and shadows, through which Shu Qi dances like Moira Shearer in “The Red Shoes,” while the “Vertigo” love theme — or a stretch of M83’s bravura, chameleonic score that sounds incredibly like it — creates an obsessive romance between the monster and the woman sent to kill him.
Catch him she does, but as she tells us, suddenly in voiceover, she is moved by his commitment to his dream life and though she cannot change his destiny, she wishes to give him a gentle death. So she cracks him open and sets a projector device whirring inside him, which causes the Fantasmer to resurface as a handsome young man in a wartime spy noir — all fedoras and train stations and “Lady From Shanghai” mirror shoot-outs — where he stands accused of murdering a man (Yan Nan) by stabbing him in the ear with a fountain pen. While this hearing-focused segment may be the least self-containedly coherent, it is as always elevated by some remarkable imagery: Sheet music flutters; a bomb shatters the roof of the train station; a pair of bloodied hands work a theremin.
Wax melts. The Big Other muses. The Fantasmer shows up 30 years later as a worker abandoned in a ruined Buddhist temple, where he encounters the Spirit of Bitterness (Chen Yongzhong), who has been hiding in his rotten tooth, in a loosely taste-based fable that plays like a Chinese folk tale of trickster deities pranking a hapless victim. And then, 20 years later again, the Fantasmer is a rapscallion father-figure to a young girl (Guo Mucheng), whom he trains to fake a supernatural ability to “smell” the correct chosen playing card from a deck. And finally, it is New Years Eve, 1999, and the Fantasmer is a callow young bleached-blond hoodlum who has never kissed a girl, and the girl (Li Gengxi) is a bewitching creature in half-moon sunglasses and high-top Converse straight from a ’90s Wong Kar-wai movie, who has perhaps kissed plenty of guys, but who has never bitten anybody.
Unfolding in a 40-minute long unbroken take, and taking in fistfights and shootouts and entire karaoke numbers, this segment does not have quite the same transportative levitating grace of the equivalent hair-raisingly transcendent 3D section of “Long Day’s Journey,” but it amazes in different ways. Like when it slides seamlessly into a character’s subjectivity and out again, or when Dong Jingsong’s miraculously mobile camera stills for a spell to observe a street party in which time-lapse people move in rapid fast-motion while a silent movie plays at normal speed in the background.
Other than the trickery of time and subjectivity (and the occasional suitcase), there is little carried over from one story to the next. But with each structured as some sort of pursuit — of a murderer, of enlightenment, of a big score, of a girl — and all contained within the broader context of the Big Other’s pursuit of the Fantasmer, “Resurrection” even at its most obscure is easy to parse as a long game of chase through allusions both lofty and lowbrow, from the high art of many of its influences all the way down to the inclusion of a riddle whose solution is “a fart.”
During the pandemic, which was when Bi Gan reconceived the film that would become “Resurrection,” one of the more curious side-effects of sudden isolation was the widespread epidemic of unusually vivid dreams, a phenomenon that seems to have subsided in tandem with Covid-19. At the same time, the old-model cinema Bi Gan so loves is being assailed by myriad developments in technology and viewing habits, as we’ve developed new distractions from our distractions and our ability — or even desire — to immerse ourselves in art has become ever more stunted. In Bi Gan’s worldview, this is an occasion for sorrow, as there is something inexpressibly beautiful about the sensorial illusion of cinema, and something inexpressibly noble about seeking refuge within it, even if that means removing yourself from reality where things, presumably, get done rather than just dreamt.
“Resurrection,” with all its extraordinarily intricate ambition is hardly what you could call a manifesto, and it will undoubtedly challenge viewers who have been trained to expect simpler structures. But for those who miss the way the movies used to act on us, it is a reminder of the uniquely paradoxical pleasures of immersion and surrender: a dazzlingly cineliterate lesson in the lost art of letting go.
