‘Resurrection' Review: Bi Gan's Dream Scenario Is The Perfect Cure For Insomnia

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23-05-2025

Arguably the worst film in competition in Cannes this year is a strong candidate for the festival's Best Director prize, and rightfully so. The follow-up to 2018's Un Certain Regard entry Long Day's Journey into Night — which asked viewers to don 3D glasses for its spectacular climax, an unbroken, hourlong tracking shot — Resurrection is both breathtaking at times and airless at others. During the first press show the aisles of the screening room resembled scenes from Otto Preminger's Exodus, and it was hard to tell how many of those who stayed in their seats were even conscious of that fact. It will have its admirers, for sure, and at least 40 minutes of it are pure visual genius, but it's hard to imagine a more willfully obscure movie that's been shown here since Wong Kar-wai's 2046.
Bi Gan is certainly a stylist, and the film luxuriates in that, starting with a fabulous opening sequence that's rather let down by wordy, pretentious title cards that posit a world in which nobody dreams, and, as a result, they live forever. There are, however, holdouts; called 'fantasmers,' they refute the fakery of the 'real' world and prefer to live in fantasy, which leads to a short life expectancy (the film compares them to candles that do not burn and hence 'exist forever'). This is complicated by the introduction of 'The Big Others,' who police the fantasmers and 'keep time linear.' Yes, you read that correctly, no, it doesn't really make much sense, and, sadly, neither does it ever.
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The film begins with an extended prologue, in which a woman — named only as 'she,' and apparently a kind of Blade Runner figure — enters the dream realm in search of a fantasmer who lives in a what appears to be a spacious nuclear bunker. He looks like Nosferatu and is surrounded by other relics from silent cinema, like a big Georges Méliès moon. The woman captures him and releases him into the outside world with a very obvious refence to the Lumiere brothers' 1895 short The Sprinkler Sprinkled. From here, we're off to the races, with a series of extended tableaux that offer diminishing returns.
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The first is the most promising, a weird meta gangster/serial killer thriller, in which the fantasmer is chased by the police for a random murder. It involves mirrors, a theremin, the music of J.S. Bach and a suitcase that can end war. While completely baffling, it has an otherworldly charm that is utterly missing from the next sequence, in which a man clearing a temple comes face to face with his toothache ('The spirit of bitterness') that seems to have erupted from a stone Buddha. Next up is a con-man story, in which a card shark befriends an abandoned young girl and trains her in deception to fleece an old man. Finally, we have New Year's Eve 1999, and a young couple who are waiting for the end of the world. The girl might be a vampire, and — who knows? — she may well be.
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While the visuals are endlessly inventive, the narrative is simply just endless; none of these vignettes seem have any plot or resolution whatsoever, which is certainly cool as a concept but not so much fun to watch. Themes bubble up, but they almost instantly disappear; there are nods to film noir (including an explicit reference to Jean-Pierre Melville's The Samurai); the card-grift sequence seems to channel both Paper Moon and Takeshi Kitano's Kikujiro; while the final stretch would appear to be an homage to Godard's famous maxim that 'all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.'
This could all be pie in the sky, and it probably is, but it's likely that Bi Gan doesn't really have anything that specific in mind, since the film is constantly in dialogue with the viewer, talking to us directly. In that respect, Resurrection (whatever that title really means) is oddly liberating, being a film that — it would appear — operates on dream logic and leaves interpretation up to the individual. It would be nice, though, to be thrown a bone once in a while. Bi Gan seems to know this and rubs it in right at the end with a joke about the film's 155-minute running time, which seems to the fantasmer — as the narrator says — to last 100 years. As the old saying goes, many a true word…
Title: ResurrectionFestival: Cannes (Competition)Director-screenwriter: Bi GanCast: Yee Jackson, Shu Qi, Yan NanSales agent: Les Filmes Du LosangesRunning time: 2 hr 35 mins
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