By the tenth day of Cannes, the movies begin to blend. Under-slept and over-stimulated, imaginations run wild, finding odd and intuitive parallels between wildly disparate propositions as weary attendees misremember which scene came from what film. And though director Bi Gan landed on a late-in-festival premiere for more pragmatic reasons – the wunderkind filmmaker was still shooting just one month ago, before delivering his final version late Wednesday night – his dense and delirious “Resurrection” couldn’t have found a more befitting slot.
Indeed, “Resurrection” condenses that bleary and bewildered experience into one virtuosic package. Viewers can stumble through more than a century of wildly disparate film iconography remixed and retrofitted for Bi Gan’s 160 minute opus, opting to either spot the reference (aha, a music cue from “Vertigo”; look, a shot lifted from “Le Samouraï”) or to simply let the immaculately made spectacle wash over them. Just don’t go in looking to make sense of much of it, as this film pastiche plays a bit like “Kill Bill” replacing all narrative structure with dream logic.
An opening title card sets the scene: In some far off dystopia where dreaming is illegal, the renegade Fantasmer (Jackson Yee) dares to… well, you know. And so it falls to The Big Other (Shu Qi) to chase this fugitive across the unconscious plane. If your head is already spinning, have no fear. Better still, you can fully ignore the content of this exposition drop – which even the film has little use for – and just focus on the presentation, styled as an inter-title from the earliest serials. And with that, we’re off!
Cannes Day 10: Sales, Sales, Sales
Wearing its sci-fi premise as lightly as can be, “Resurrection” plays as six formal riffs spanning the silent-era to the present day. That opening volley finds the pursuer chasing her target – here decked out to look like Nosferatu – across a shifting landscape that folds in opium dens, Méliès backdrops and the distorted forms of a certain Caligari. Moving with the jittery rhythm of a hand-cranked 16-frames-per-second reel, the chase also moves in reverse, culminating with a recreation of 1895 Lumière Brothers short (you know, the one with the hose). Rather than aping any single aesthetic, Bi Gan wrangles his various visual influences into a period-spanning fever trance – and he does so again when the film leaps to the next sequence.
Soon, the screen goes wide and the color-tones run chrome blue for a war-era search for some all-important briefcase. We can vaguely recognize the film’s star, now in a sharp suit pulled from the racks of Alain Delon and Tony Leung, but the narrative grows ever-more inscrutable. From this point forward, “Resurrection” recreates that precise feeling of walking into a movie already well underway. We struggle to get our bearings, to make sense of the characters and their internal dynamics, and when we don’t always succeed, we can at least marvel at the craft. The director follows no fixed blueprint, pulling visual language from noirs and neo-noirs — 1940s classics as well as films by Alex Proyas and Kim Jee-woon, who were themselves riffing on those earlier works — and collapses them all into something wholly singular.
Building on his previous effort, “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” the filmmaker once again tries to capture the “Yes and” fluidity of sleep logic. In a sequence set in a snowy Buddhist temple, Yee pulls out a tooth and folds it in a snowball. He throws the snowball against a wall, with the exploding flakes turning into a man, who we later learn is the hero’s father, who we later learn he killed. All the while the snowman/dead-dad puffs on a cigarette that burns without being consumed. Holding this to any linear standard would be futile and self-defeating, as foolish as saying yes when a friend offers to describe their own dreams. That’s part of the fun.
Shot with fetishistic reverence for visual textures and color palettes, and scored by French electro-duo M83, “Resurrection” is the utmost exercise in style. Still, those games of recognition and confusion can run thin over a mammoth runtime, so the director shifts gears in the final act, staging the last hour as an unbroken take following two youths as they criss-cross a harbor town on the last night of 1999, convinced the world’s going to end.
Breathlessly conceived and astonishingly pulled-off, this bravura sequence also injects a sense of playfulness that elevates an ever-intriguing cinematic riff to something genuinely sui generis. Many might come up with a sequence that overlays gangster and horror tropes with bursts of violence and dance; few would then toggle between first-and third-person perspectives; and only Bi Gan would have that first-person camera start singing karaoke.
The result is cine-euphoria – capping the film and this year’s Cannes Film Festival with something wholly new. “Resurrection” may end with an elegy, laying cinema to rest, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. We’ve only just Bi Gan.
