Assignments don’t get a lot more challenging for a film critic than Bi Gan’s Resurrection. On the one hand, it’s one of the more wondrous visions that critic is likely to come across, replete with imagery, framing, and bits of cinematic magic that approach perfection in their execution. On the other, it’s a narrative composed largely of dream logic, built right into the premise, considering as it does a world where most people do not dream – taking us into the extended dream of one that does. Whether or not the critic feels the cumulative power of what passes before their eyes, they must acknowledge that there’s something of a masterpiece in these two hours and 40 minutes.
The thing is, despite the fact that cinema is a medium of visions – and that Bi can rightly be called a visionary in that medium – films are also something we experience intellectually. Dream logic, however masterfully shot and edited, has its limitations, and critics must react to more than just the beauty before them.
It’s right to take the perspective of the critic so openly into a review of Resurrection, throwing back the curtain that usually remains closed, because Resurrection throws open that curtain first, specifically asking its viewers to think of itself as an example of the cinematic art form. It begins with a passage designed as a silent film, in which we get the lion’s share of our exposition about what this project is, which heavily features a film projector. It ends with an abstract vision of an audience in an auditorium, consuming cinema. In between is an ode to the power of cinema, told in four short films that emphasise the senses: hearing, taste, smell and touch. Vision needn’t have its own short, because vision is a constant throughout.
In this world, human beings have discovered the secret to eternal life: to no longer dream. According to the film, they are like candles that don’t burn, and therefore can last forever. Those who do dream are like outlaws in this world, called Deliriants, whose rebellious act has dire implications for the way time functions. Miss Shu (Shu Qi), who appears to exist at a time around the dawn of cinema, has tracked down one particular Deliriant (Jackson Yee), following him into the subterranean depths of an opium den. The old man’s body is hunched and ruined. Unable to live in a world where dreaming is outlawed, he asks to be relieved of his life – which Miss Shu does in a manner that extends his consciousness for a century of dreaming life before he finally passes.
We see the dreams he experiences, continually reappearing as a character in each, and each moving forward a time period throughout the 20th century. In the first, he’s involved in a murder investigation featuring a theremin and characters who put out their own ability to hear through a self-inflected knife wound in their ear canal. In the second, he’s one of two characters in a wintry monastery in which meaning is derived from the taste of rocks. In the third, he teaches an orphan a trick of identifying playing cards by their smell, a scam to pull on marks, and there are riddles involved. In the last, he has a love affair with a hip young woman who may be a vampire, on New Year’s Eve 1999, in a single take that moves throughout the city. These sections are also in different genres and usually represent different filmmaking styles, sometimes recalling specific films, sometimes existing on their own.
Each of the four tales we see has an internal logic to it, a basic story, though within that logic and story there are varying degrees of expressionism. Any literalism is always held loosely, and the dialogue is informed as much by ancient Chinese philosophy and parable as it is driven by plot. The stories alternate in their accessibility, the first and third giving us more story to grab hold of, the second and fourth remaining more experiential.
Since Resurrection is a film of astonishing technical accomplishments, the section that warrants the most interest is the opening, with its boxy aspect ratio, its title cards, its lack of spoken dialogue and its silent film score. The spirit of Georges Melies is alive and well in this section, as we are treated to sleights of hands and feats of cinematic derring do that are presented to us almost casually. Just to list a few examples, in one moment, the Deliriant holds what appears to be a cake with flowers lining the circumference. These flowers appear to spin like in one of those persistence of vision machines. Then there’s the scene where Miss Shu makes her way through the cubist architecture of a series of underground rooms, the camera following her, as the blocking of the set continually reframes her in ways it should have been impossible to coordinate. At one point, a box full of sand pours up from whence it came.
Resurrection can be appreciated purely in this way from moment to moment, as there is magic throughout, even in the slightly greater reality in which the short films are grounded. The themes can be a bit more opaque. The significance of what happens in the shorts feels weighty, but it isn’t always possible to extract a message from them, either unto themselves or in conjunction with the other shorts as part of a unified whole. How much this matters to any individual viewer will be a key indicator in its success with them, though there is usually a poignancy that cannot be denied.
If there’s one clear impression created by the collected whole of Resurrection, it’s that it is uniquely a product of the movies, using tools that have left us gasping in awe for more than a hundred years. We need love letters like this if we want to keep naively hoping that cinema will retain its place of prominence in the cultural landscape. Bi Gan might have written that love letter in a language that was more accessible at any given moment to more of his audience, but then, it wouldn’t have made use of the sublime the way the best cinema can. Resurrection could never have been a painting, a novel or a song. It reminds us why we go to the movies.
Resurrection opened yesterday in cinemas.