Bi Gan’s Resurrection opens with a title card that sets the scene for his third feature: we’re in a future where the secret to eternal life has been discovered. It’s simple – don’t dream! Humans who give up dreaming can live forever. But there are some hold-outs who choose to dream in secret at the risk of having shorter lives and going mad in the process. These ‘fantasmers’ are assisted by ‘Big Others’ who wake the dreamers, keeping them from being lost to the dream realm forever. The life of one fantasmer plays out across five chapters in Gan’s film (co-written with Bai Xue), a sensory odyssey spanning the history of cinema, with more references than it’s possible to comprehend in a single viewing.
Since he began his filmmaking career in 2015 with Kalil Blues Bi Gan has been establishing quite a reputation for himself on the global film stage – in 2018, when his second feature Long Day’s Journey Into Night premiered at Cannes, the audiences arrived to find 3D glasses placed upon their seats, to be used half-way through the film. It’s quite astounding that at just 35 years old Bi Gan is operating at such a level of ambition and scale – in Resurrection he doubles down, condensing a century of film history into a 160-minute epic. It’s obvious from the start that ‘dreams’ here are representative of ‘films’ – the ‘fantasmers’ are the wily, reckless visionaries who think them up – but Gan does help out the clueless with a late mention of the ‘forgotten language of cinematography’ which feels like a cheeky sideswipe at the content mill mindset of the modern film industry.
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Gan traces the life of one fantasmer – a monster made in the image of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu or Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari played by young heartthrob and skilled physical performer Jackson Yee – across five dreams, from a wartime noir to a vampire nightclub at the dawn of the new millennium, each with its own distinct visual identity. The fantasmer, played by Yee, takes on a different identity each time, but there is inevitably some conflict that plays out. He’s a wanted murderer in one dream; then a thief confronting the Spirit of Bitterness; a card shark teaching a young girl the art of the con in another; a young punk who falls in love with a vampire in the stunning 40-minute one-take finale. (Resurrection operates with such a deluge of ideas and themes it’s quite baffling that Cannes chose to programme the film in a 10pm slot at the end of festival when audiences were already jonesing for a decent’s night’s sleep.) He is looked after by his Big Other, played by the seemingly ageless Millennium Mambo star Shu Qi (the casting of veteran Shu Qi and newcomer Yee feels like another Bi Gan easter egg) who develops an almost maternal tenderness towards him as the film progresses, promising the fantasmer a gentle death as he lives out his final handful of dreams.
As well as the vastly different tonal and narrative beats Resurrection hits, Gan encorporates different styles, from the silent-era style of the film’s opening with its paper puppetry and title cards displaying dialogue through to the bold and brash neons of the final Y2K segment, where he delivers some solid camera wizardry in a ‘single take’ cribbing from his own Long Day’s Journey playbook. It’s a staggering feast for the senses (each segment revolves around one of them) but even more so a true love letter to cinema written bold and brilliant. Despite its inconsistencies – the noir section in particular feels incomplete, as though it was shaved down to meet a mandated runtime – Resurrection has to be seen to be believed, and Bi Gan continues to ascend in both his imaginative and filmmaking capabilities. It’s as thrilling to watch Resurrection as it is to imagine what the director might do next.
