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Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Resurrection' Review: Director Bi Gan's Beguiling, Beautifully Realized Journey Through the Life, Death and Possible Rebirth of Cinema
One of the most audacious young auteurs working today, 35-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan makes movies that don't pull you in as much as they slowly wash over you. Moody, melancholic and filled with daunting technical feats, especially the director's signature logistics-defying long takes, his films are beautifully realized meditations on nostalgia and loss in which the cinema is often a character itself. In his beguiling new feature Resurrection, movies are both subject and object of a story spanning a hundred years of film history, from the silent era to the end of the last century. Reflecting on the seventh art's past, present and possible future at a moment when many believe it to be in its death throes, Bi Gan has crafted a time-tripping, genre-jumping paean to the big screen in which he revives the films he loves and then buries them a second time over — hoping, perhaps, to resurrect cinema in the process. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'A Private Life' Review: A Delightfully Paired Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil Escape Injury in a Messy but Pleasurable Genre Collision Cannes: Hasan Hadi's 'The President's Cake' Wins Directors' Fortnight Audience Award 'Heads or Tails?' Review: John C. Reilly Plays Buffalo Bill in a Wacky Italy-Set Western With Ambition to Burn Tailor-made for those viewers who fantasize about being trapped in the Criterion closet, this dreamy 156-minute behemoth is certainly not for mainstream arthouse fans hoping to catch a glimpse of the next Oscar favorite. But it's a rewarding watch that gives us another idea of what movies can do, even if Bi Gan seems to be mostly mourning their demise. Death and dreams are indeed at the center of a phantasmagorical narrative divided into five long chapters, plus a short epilogue, each told in the specific style of its epoch. Bi loosely connects them through a premise that only a crazy film lover like him could conjure up: In a parallel world that may be our own, people no longer dream and can therefore live forever. The select few who choose to keep dreaming are known as 'Fantasmers,' leading existences that burn brightly but shortly. And then there are 'The Other Ones,' whose job is to awaken the Fantasmers from their illusive slumbers. Does that make sense? Too bad, but anyway plot and plausibility are far less important than the experiential qualities Resurrection offers those willing to accept its fairy tale-like pitch. Bi guides us into his fantasy world during an opening section, set during the silent film era and narrated with intertitles, where The Other One (Shu Qi, star of several classic Hou Hsiao-Hsien movies) pursues a Nosferatu-like Fantasmer (Jackson Yee) across a merry-go-round of studio décors straight out of the German Expressionist period. You don't have to know your movie history to understand what Bi is doing in that sequence, though it certainly helps. His film is packed with nods to other films that trace the evolution of cinematic style and craft, from the jerky hand-cranked illusions of the 1910s and 20s to the roving Steadicam shots of the past era. Early on, the score by French electro group M83 either copies or barely remixes Bernard Herrmann's themes from Vertigo — which, as all good Hitchcock fans know, is another story of death and resurrection. Those themes quite literally bleed into the film's succeeding chapters, which encompass a WWII-era film noir involving a trenchcoated investigator (Mark Chao); a Buddhist temple in the 1960s or 70s whose crumbling ruins give birth to a menacing spirit; a tale of magic and trickery involving a rich mobster (Zhang Zhijian) regretting the loss of his child; and a dazzling thriller set in a red-light district on the eve of the last millennium. The Fantasmer reappears in each section as a different character with a new look, propelled from epoch to epoch by The Other One. (Don't ask how this all happens.) He never ages and can seemingly live forever, just like the F.W. Murnau character of the silent movie part — or the actual vampire we see in the penultimate chapter. When, toward the start of the movie, 35mm film stock is inserted into the Fantasmer's back, Bi seems to be suggesting that vampires and cinema have a lot in common: Both can survive eternally as long as they remain in the dark. For the latter, that means being projected onto a screen in front of an audience, which is why Resurrection begins and ends with scenes inside of a movie theater, one coming to life and the other melting away. This is heady stuff and probably won't interest those who can't recognize many scenes — such as a recreation of the Lumière brothers' pioneering short L'Arroseur Arrosé, which gets projected later on — as metaphors for, or homages to, film itself. And yet Bi's talent for creating transfixing set-pieces, which at times recalls the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, allows you to get submerged by his movie without always knowing what you're watching. You just need to keep your eyes open and go with the flow. And it's worth doing that in order to reach the 1999 chapter, during which the director stages another formidable, seemingly impossible long take that sees the Fantasmer and his elusive love interest (Li Gengxi) wandering through a riverside wasteland, from the closing minutes of the last century until the dawn of a new one. Reteaming with DP Dong Jingsong, who pulled off a similar feat in Long Day's Journey into Night, Bi tries to top himself this time by shifting points of view within the same unending shot, racing down corridors and into rave parties, then into a karaoke scene interrupted by brutal gunfire, until we're suddenly aboard a ship as the sun begins to rise on the year 2000. Such sequence-shots, now known unfortunately as 'oners,' tend to be destined for film lovers as well, who can admire the high level of craft it takes to pull them off. Bi is bold and unabashed when it comes to displaying (some would say showing off) his technique, nor does he hide his many references (in the case of the red-filtered long take, there are hints of Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels and Hou's Millennium Mambo). He also doesn't hide the fact that Resurrection is both a celebration of the art he loves and something like an inhumation. It looks back at its past with longing and regret, while failing to clearly see its future — especially at a time when people go to the movies much less than they used to. And yet there's a hopefulness in Bi's enigmatic concoction, not necessarily in what it's saying but in how it's being said, finding exquisite new forms in old and dead ones so that the cinema can keep on living. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV
New York Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Caught by the Tides' Review: Jia Zhangke Sees Constant Flux
In 'Caught by the Tides,' the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke tracks a woman, a couple and a country across two tumultuous, transformational decades. As emotionally effective as it is formally brilliant, it draws on a trove of material — both fiction and nonfiction — that Jia began shooting in 2001 while working on another movie. He continued to document a dizzyingly changing China, a heroic project that has finally resulted in 'Caught by the Tides,' a tour de force that is at once an affecting portrait of a people in flux and a soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament from one of our greatest living filmmakers. Jia has directed more than a dozen feature-length movies since his 1997 drama 'Pickpocket,' about a low-level thief, but the impoverished state of foreign-language distribution in the United States means that his work tends to quickly slip in and out of art houses here before heading to living rooms. He's a rock star on the international festival circuit, however, and a favorite of the Cannes Film Festival, where his movies regularly screen in competition. Jia won the best screenplay award at Cannes for his 2013 masterpiece 'A Touch of Sin,' but he tends to be overlooked by juries because while his movies aren't difficult, they don't offer obvious pleasures. They're thoughtful, and they need to be watched thoughtfully in turn. That's true of 'Caught by the Tides,' which follows a character who's been featured in some of Jia's earlier features, Qiaoqiao — Zhao Tao, Jia's wife and longtime star — a willowy stunner with sharply planed cheekbones and a steady, penetrating gaze. That gaze is especially crucial here because while Zhao's star charisma immediately commands your attention, her character never says a word. Instead, Qiaoqiao texts and she watches, observing the world and the people in it with eyes that, at times, flash with amusement and anger. When she's with lover, Bin (Li Zhubin), her eyes also pool with tears that he doesn't deserve. Zhao is a sensitive, subtly expressive screen performer who can convey a world of feeling with a single look. Even so, a heroine who can speak but doesn't could have been risky for Jia because her silence could drain the character of complexity and, importantly, a sense of female agency. Here, though, everything that needs to be said is said both in bits of conversation that fill in the elliptical story and in the many documentary passages, which makes her a stand-in for Jia. Bin, a small-time hood more interested in money than in Qiaoqiao, does speak, yet his words are invariably less eloquent than her (and Jia's) quiet. The story, such as it is, opens in the northern city of Datong and emerges gradually without the usual filmmaking preamble and prompts. If Jia has ever read a screenwriting manual, he probably immediately tossed it, laughing. His work fits more readily into art-cinema traditions than those of Hollywood, but is nevertheless insistently nonprogrammatic. 'Caught by the Tides' takes place over some 20 years that, contrary to convention, aren't shaped into neatly defined three (four or five) acts. Instead, time in the movie flows, just as in life. One minute, Qiaoqiao is young and has a bob and bangs; in the next she's clearly older, and appears more inwardly directed, her now-long hair pulled back in a ponytail. Qiao and Bin's emotionally fraught romance winds throughout 'Caught by the Tides,' but the movie's heart and its obvious sympathies are more with her than with him. About a half-hour into the movie, she appears one night watching a joyful, raucous crowd flooding the street. It's 2001, and China has just been named as the host of the 2008 summer Olympics. ('China won!') The country is on the move, and Qiaoqiao soon will be too. Shortly thereafter, Bin splits to pursue a business venture elsewhere, and she follows. She'll keep on following him for the remainder of the movie amid national milestones, more crowds, dramatic turns, many songs and a multitude of young and old, unlined and weathered faces. It's never clear what Qiaoqiao sees in Bin other than his careless, near-sullen inattention toward her, which, of course, can be exceedingly potent romantic catnip. Whatever the reason, she is drawn to him despite his schemes and roving eye. The first time they appear together in a scene is at a club where she finds him cozily sitting side by side with a woman who's wearing the kind of chalk-white makeup, elaborate headdress and costume worn in traditional Chinese opera. The differences between that woman and the casually up-to-date Qiaoqiao — emblems of the old and new China — couldn't be more striking. Just as notable is how Bin treats Qiaoqiao, whom he brusquely tells to sit, gesturing toward a seat opposite him. Viewers who've seen Jia's drama 'Unknown Pleasures' (2002) might wonder if they're experiencing déjà vu while watching this scene. That's because in the first two-thirds of 'Caught,' Jia has drawn from material that he shot years earlier, including alternate takes from some of his older movies, notably 'Pleasures' and 'Ash Is Purest White' (2019), in which Zhao's characters have the same name. This creates a startling continuity because in 'Caught,' you're watching not just characters age in a few hours but also the actors playing them, changes that mirror the accelerated pace of China's embrace of capitalism. The country joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 (the year that 'Caught' opens), and is now the world's second biggest economy. Few filmmakers blend the personal and the political, the micro and macro, as brilliantly as Jia does. In movie after movie, he doesn't gesture at the larger forces affecting his character's lives, say, with a brief shot of someone wincing at a news report on TV. For Jia, China and, perhaps more rightly, all the many (many!) other men and women in 'Caught in the Tides' are much like Qiaoqiao and Bin, characters in a larger story. Again and again, Jia cuts from the lovers to images of other people dancing, talking, singing and restlessly, insistently moving forward as they keep pace (or try to) with their rapidly moving country. Early on in 'Caught by the Tides,' there's a short scene that shows several dozen men of differing ages seated on some stone steps outside a building. They're humbly dressed, mostly in muted colors. A few look old enough to have been alive when Mao Zedong was in power, and it's hard not to wonder at the seismic changes they've seen and endured. Not long after, there's a cut to Qiaoqiao walking along railway tracks with her back toward the camera. She soon passes a group of miners headed in the opposite direction. Datong is a coal city, and while miners like these have helped turn China into a powerhouse, Jia's focus remains on Qiaoqiao, who's resolutely headed into the future.
Associated Press
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Movie Review: The sweep of history courses through Jia Zhangke's ‘Caught By the Tides'
Jia Zhangke's 'Caught by the Tides' is less than two hours long and yet contains nearly a quarter-century of time's relentless march forward. Few films course with history the way it does in the Chinese master's latest, an epic collage that spans 21 years. Jia undertook the film during the pandemic, assembling a mix of fiction and documentary, including images from his earlier films as well as newly shot scenes. That might sound like a mishmash kind of moviemaking. But for Jia, the preeminent cinematic chronicler of 21st century China, it's a remarkably cohesive, even profound vessel for capturing what has most interested him as a filmmaker: the tidal wave-sized currents of technological progress and social transmutation that wash over a lifetime. The high-speed upheavals of modern China are, of course, a fitting setting for such interests. Jia's films are often most expressed in their surroundings — in vistas of infrastructure that dwarf his protagonists. Fans of Jia will recognize some from his previous films. For me, there's never been a more moving backdrop from him than the rubble and mass displacement of the Three Gorges Dam project (seen here, as in his 2008 film 'Still Life'). 'Caught by the Tides' is ostensibly about Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao, Jia's wife and muse) and her lover Bin (Li Zhubin), whom she searches for years after a row sent them in different directions. But in 'Caught by the Tides,' these characters are more like life rafts bobbing in expansive waters, making their way aimlessly. The poetry of 'Caught by the Tides' comes from a grander arc. In one of the film's opening scenes, shot on grainy digital film, women in a Datong city room laugh together, singing old, half-remembered songs. The film's final scenes, set more than two decades later in the southern city of Zhuhai, are more crisply photographed and depict a more impersonal world of smartphones, robots and QR codes. For a moment, Jia even adopts the perspective of a surveillance camera. Another moment: a shot, from pre-digital times, drifting down a street with men looking back at us, smoking and mildly curious. Cut then to what might be the same street years later, where a woman parades as a model in front of a sprawling shopping mall. In 'Caught by the Tides,' these changes go unexplained and unspoken. But the evolutions they chart are deeply familiar to anyone who has lived through even some of these years, in China or elsewhere. We see how people once moved differently, spoke differently and sang differently. Progress and loss exist together as one. Zhao and Li age through the film, leaving them weathered, too, by time. A song late in the film goes: 'I can't grasp the warmth we once shared.' 'Caught by the Tides,' a Sideshow and Janus Films release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. In Mandarin. Running time: 116 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
