[ad_1]
Chinese writer-director Bi Gan believes that filmmaking can capture his wildest dreams. Resurrection is his attempt to convince you that it can capture yours too.
It’s ambitious to make a movie about how making movies is like harvesting dreams, projecting viewers’ inner lives back at them, often to visceral, abstract, and sometimes tummy-hurting ends. This is ambitious for even the director of Long Day’s Journey into Night, a puzzling 2018 noir that concludes with a 56-minute continuous-shot meant to be experienced in 3D, and Kaili Blues (2015), which boasts its own 41-minute unbroken take. To say the least: This is not easy shit to pull off.
The big business of conjuring hours-long apparitions for theater screens is rarely understood as easy, but knowing Bi’s virtuosic visual canon, you likely expect his subsequent and latest film, Resurrection, to have its own long take. And you’d be correct; of course it does. But that’s only one small bite of the film’s wonders.
That’s right, we’re feasting on concepts here. I’m comfortable mixing metaphors, because Resurrection mixes senses, charging the realm of sight and sound with synaesthetic ardor. In five unreal vignettes, loosely assembled as dreams within dreams—or simply just one dream contorting and transforming into the next—Bi attaches film genres and archetypes to stories with an intent to engage the senses beyond those an able-bodied person typically uses to watch movies.
Just as, in one segment, a scuzzy con-man (Jackson Yee, who plays a different character in each dream) teaches a little orphaned girl (Guo Mucheng) how to count cards by smelling them, so does Bi compel viewers to taste the film, to feel it. It’s all an illusion; the girl can’t actually smell the identity of playing cards. Still, amidst the smoke and mirrors of cinema, Bi can trick the audience for a few hours into accepting the reality of whatever surreal logic is presented.
Taking place “in a wild brutal era” according to the silent-film-like title cards that introduce Resurrection, the story briefly sets the stage for a near-future that reads more as fairy tale than sci-fi plot. We learn quickly that humans no longer dream, because they’ve figured out that dreaming is what prevents us from being immortal. “People not dreaming is like [sic] candles that do not burn—they can exist forever!”
Those who still dream are called Deliriants, and hunted for the harm they bring to the world (and history and even time itself) through the delinquency of their rampant hallucinations. Hunters can enter the dreams of Deliriants to find them and kill them. However, one powerful Deliriant has been hiding for over a century, seemingly, inside his dreams. No one knows what he looks like, “because he has been hiding in an ancient, forgotten past. That is film!”
Drawing the line as obviously as possible between our dreams, our history, and the past century of cinema, Bi shows us the Deliriant’s five dream-films before he’s ultimately captured and dispatched, his life finally melting away like a candle.
Hunters shadow Yee’s character through his imagined worlds. First is the silent movie with overt influences of German expressionism. Then comes a mist-wrapped noir with a suitcase macguffin and eardrum violence, followed by a kind of neo-realist fable in which Yee as a former-monk-turned-grave-robber releases the Spirit of Bitterness from a damaged tooth.
Sight, then sound, then taste—each segment represents an era or genre of film suffused with the senses. After the con man story plays with our sense of smell, the final scene—a modern crime film coupled with a vampiric love story, shades of Romeo and Juliet brightening its darker corners with neon—plays out in the director’s now-characteristic one-take shot. It’s a revelation.
Early in the film, the Deliriant says via title card, “Illusions may bring pain, but they are incredibly real!” He rails against waking up: “I do not want to live in that fake world.” Honestly, same.
Accompanied by a score from M83 that vacillates between classical compositions and the cloudy retro-futurism for which the group is known, Resurrection is as much a display of Bi’s ingenuity—special effects both in-camera and CGI supplant the workmanlike tendencies of plot for something, well, dreamier—as it is a showcase for his cinematographer, Dong Jinsong. Together, Bi and Dong cram a lifetime of enigmatic texture and effusive love of the movies into 160 minutes. It’s hard not to be captivated by that.
Resurrection opens at Living Room Theaters, 341 SW 10th; Cinemark Century Eastport Plaza 16, 4040 SE 82nd, on Thurs Jan 1, 156 minutes, rated R.
[ad_2]
Dom Sinacola
Source link