Resurrection

 The Chinese director, Bi Gan, is an important cultural asset for the Communist regime and he seems to have been given an unlimited budget to produce his newest film Resurrection (2025).  Bi Gan is a favorite at film festivals, won a special prize at Cannes last year, and he is indisputably a very interesting and talented film maker.  His two previous pictures are famous for intricate long single takes -- these are Kali Blues and Long Days Journey into Night.  The technical audacity on display in his movies is impressive and, even, daunting and Resurrection, the director's biggest and most complex film has been generally acclaimed as an instant classic.  It got the Criterion treatment within nine months of its release.  I saw the picture on the Criterion disc, a beautiful transfer but one that is woefully short on extras which would have been greatly appreciated in light of the movie's very elliptical and confusing narrative and its constellation of movie allusions and local references, none of which I have been able to convincingly decipher.  The question, I suppose, is whether this long movie (159 minutes) deserves the acclaim with which it seems to have been, more or less, universally greeted.  Unfortunately, I found the movie cold, lifeless, and, more or less, impossible to understand.  It's certainly gorgeous and packed full of spectacular images but there is something forced about the whole project.  Bi Gan doesn't seem to have any compelling narrative to tell and so he sutures together four or five (depending on how you count) unrelated sequences, and tries to persuade us that the separate plots comprise a whole,  The director is doing more or less what is expected of him -- the picture concludes with an incredibly complicated 39 minute long take (just as he ended Kali Blues, I think the best of his movies, and A Long Day's Journey into Night).  Clearly, inspiration has flagged, even failed and so Bi Gan uses brute force to construct the movie, contriving an unconvincing frame story that makes no sense -- and, then, squandering his energy on spectacular if lifeless camerawork and effects.  You should see the movie to admire the technical craft but, ultimately, I don't think that the picture coheres, nor does it seem particularly persuasive to me on any level.

The reputation of the movie, which precedes it in cinephile circles, is that Bi Gan recapitulates the history of movies in the frame story and the four episodes that comprise the bulk of the picture.  But this isn't really true.  Critics claim that each episode is shot in a different style.  If this is true, I was unable to perceive any particular distinction between the movie techniques used in the different narratives.  To the contrary, everything is bombastic, overdone, using complicated camera movements (mostly elaborate wall-penetrating tracking shots to the right), crane shots and vertically organized imagery peering down into round depressions and concavities -- often, the imagery is organized around certain crater-like amphitheaters into which the camera peers.  Bi Gan moves the camera on all axes -- that is, he tracks horizontally and cranes up and down as well.  This is spectacular but exhausting -- the style is mostly rehashed Tarkovsky with a hint of Ridley Scott's Bladerunner thrown in for a good measure.  Bi Gan mimics some old movie techniques in the frame story and the first narrative, but, after that, each sequence is shot in a way that we come to identify as Bi Gan's exuberant and rhetorically dense "house style."  

The frame to this four part anthology makes no sense.  In the future, humanity has achieved immortality at the cost of suppressing all dreams.  Dreams, it is said, are like candles -- if never lit the vehicle will survive forever.  Dreaming is, perhaps, forbidden and suppressed, although this isn't made clear because the movie is wholly apolitical, I suppose, a requirement of the CCP.  People who still dream are called "Delirients" and they are regarded as monstrous.  In some way, Delirents are equated to movies (or moviemakers) -- a movie is a kind of waking dream, apparently, conceived by the hideous "monster" delirient who motivates the frame story and bookends the four narratives.

In the frame prologue, we see a movie theater exposed behind burning celluloid.  The theater is at the turn of the 20th century and the crowd has turned to glare behind them, in the direction opposite to the screen, at some sort of disturbance.  The people in the theater flee, possibly because a monster is looking at them.  But a young woman sets up a camera and aims it right at the hypothetical lens that is our point of view.  There's a brothel, filmed in a peculiar shot aimed down into a round space where a white peacock luxuriates among the whores and their customers.  A giant hand twice enters the frame to rearrange the set which, otherwise, seems, more or less, realistically portrayed.  We learn that this is an opium den in which a dreaming Delirient is kept in a kind of oubliette or subterranean cell.  Sometimes, he is fed with showers of rose petals.  A woman staggers through a Caligari-like set, all jagged angles and doorways cut through cardboard walls one after another -- each flat is lit with a different deeply saturated color.  The woman frees the monster and leads him into a meadow where there is a garden hose.  The monster is pale with ears that seem to be melted down, scars all over the dome of his white head, and a nose like Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera.  The woman reprises the oldest gag in cinema, the trick where you crimp a hose and, then, allow the water to suddenly flow, flooding into the face of the gardener manipulating the hose. (This imitates Lumiere's one minute Arroseur arose. "The tables turned.") This is too much for the poor monster and he curls up to die on a tapestry of green grass and flowers.  

The first story is some sort of impenetrable film noir shot, however, in the lush overrripe style of the French romantic realists -- there are railroad tracks leading toward a gloomy horizon and the sets are all damp and gloomy with drifting mist.  A guy is hung by his heels and savagely whipped.  There are interrogations and threats of harm all relating to a mysterious suitcase.  (This part of the movie seems influenced by Peter Greenaway's three movies about the suitcases of Tulse Luper and there is a Greenaway sort of brutal relentlessness about the imagery). Ultimately, the treasure in the suitcase turns out to be a theremin.  Why? There is no way of knowing.  With the theremin revealed the sequence ends with the fedora and trench-coat clad hero vanishing just as he entered, sleeping in a railroad car hurrying over a desolate plain.  I wasn't able to decipher this story and can't tell you what it is supposed to mean.  In fact, the plot is jumbled, involves someone poking out his eardrums for obscure reasons, and, possibly, committing suicide.  The narrative mess is probably intentional, with flashbacks using identical Chinese actors, but it's pretty clear to me that Bi Gan had no idea himself what he was trying to accomplish here.  

The next episode is said to take place 20 years later, perhaps in the 1950's.  I interpret the story as involving, perhaps, the Korean War, but this is speculative.  A group of soldiers (I think -- although they don't seem armed) are deposited by truck at a steep hill with thick brush covered in hoar-frost.  They make their way to the top of the hill where there is a large ruined temple. (The situation reminds me of Fuller's The Steel Helmet in which American troops are trapped in a Korean temple but in Bi Gan's movie its not even clear that scene involves soldiers -- maybe, they are just looters.)  Snow falls and rain.  The men take Buddha statues from the temple and one of the guys pisses on one of the crudely carved figures.  (These statues have the capacity to blow up suddenly, exploding into stone fragments.)  A man is left behind for some reason.  The fellow has a toothache and employs a folk remedy -- he tastes two stones from one of the spontaneously blown apart Buddha statues; the one that tastes most bitter, he uses to knock out the aching tooth.  A figure wearing a tee-shirt and smoking a cigarette that never diminishes in size appears.  He is some kind of Bodhisattva of "bitterness", a lesser deity I think.  He talks with the the soldier and, after a while, the two men are marking the snow with wooden sticks spelling out the Chinese ideograms for bitter and sweet.  There is an iris effect in this sequence, matching some earlier iris imagery -- a trough of water covered in green scum is disturbed to create a circular aperture that, then, the floating algae closes; the image seems to suggest the "movieness" of the movie, foregrounding its repertoire of cinematic effects.  The soldier says that his father was bit by a "strange dog" and dying, so the man helped him along by feeding him toxic potatoes that had sprouted.  A black dog of the kind seen in Tarkovsky movies appears in the ruined temple and, then, vanishes.

After an interlude showing melting candle wax (the imagery of the candles may derive from the Mexican movie Macario in which each lit candle represents a life) we meet another of Bi Gan's drifters, a con man who is riding on a heap of garbage in a truck bed.  This drifter picks up a package of money (that may be counterfeit) wrapped in a flyer that is soliciting people with supernatural powers.  (This scene occurs in the public toilet at a bus station, another of Bi Gan's deep amphitheater-shaped spaces, the place ringed with greasy-spoon (greasy chopstick?) restaurants.  The drifter meets a small child who asks him some riddles.  It is revealed that the boy's father has vanished.  But before leaving, he wrote on a bank note this riddle which the boy can't solve:  "What is it that once let go, can never be got back?"  The plot of this tale is like a Chinese version of the Peter Bogdanovich picture Paper Moon.  (The little boy turns out to be a little girl -- apparently Chinese urchins are completely androgynous.)  The drifter and the child run a con-game involving the child guessing the face of cards held up before her.  The trick is done with coded gestues.  Ultimately, the scam gets them entangled with a Chinese mobster.  The mobster blindfolds the girl but she still guesses correctly.  The gangster, then, burns a card to ashes.  The little girl sniffs the card;s ashes and figures out what it is.  That night, the con-man and girl check into a hotel.  The con-man finds a bill in his wallet with the riddle written on it.  The child thinks that if the riddle is solved, her father will return.  The con-man sneaks out in the middle of the night, goes to the silent and empty bus terminal and buys a ticket for "the farthest place away."  Back at the gangster's swimming pool, the gangster opens a mysterious suitcase containing a lie detector machine and administers the test to the child.  The story is mildly interesting but literally goes nowhere.  In the last scene, we see the con-man riding on a heap of garbage being hauled somewhere. 

The last sequence is shot in deeply saturated colors, at night, mostly blue and blood-red.  The story takes place among waterfront dives in an old harbor somewhere, a warren of alleys and crumbling buildings uphill from the port.  This narrative is set in 1999, on New Year's Eve.  A punk kid named Apollo is standing by the water when some thugs on motorcycles grab a guy off the street and hang him from a streetlamp or balcony -- his legs thrashing around in the background accompany the scene in which Apollo is warned by a mysterious girl about the "raincoat gang"; significantly, the girl appears in profile as a figure smoking a cigarette, a shadow cast on the girder of some big harbor apparatus used to hoist cargo out of holds.  The girl and Apollo hurry through the streets of the redlight district, interacting briefly with various criminals and whores.  The girl wants to stay up all night and see the dawn.  Finally, they end up in Karaoke Bar where a gangster named Mr. Lua croons pop songs while his minions beat the hell out of Apollo.  It turns out that the girl is Lua's mistress and that both she and her boss are...wait for it!...vampires.  Somehow, Apollo survives the beating.  He and the vampire girl run through the streets, now empty in the cold grey light just before dawn.  They return to the weird iron scaffolding where they met and climb down to a boat, said to be red, that has come at seven a.m. as foretold by Apollo.  Apollo and the girl steer the boat out into the harbor and point it East to where the sun is rising.  The girl tears open Apollo's throat with her fangs, presumably transforming him into a vampire also.  As the sun rises, the two characters slip out of the frame, killed, it seems, by the dawn's early light.  There's an epilogue in which the dead Apollo is taken on a gurney to a movie set where the woman turns him into the monster who died in the prologue -- she carefully peels off the blood and wounds stuck to Apollo and substitutes the grotesque mask and make-up of the Deliriant monster.  Under a starry sky, we see a ruined building, something like a chapel.  The building turns into a damaged movie theater.  Figures with bodies of light gather to watch a movie and, on the screen, the words "THE END" and "By Bi Gan" are projected.  Then, the audience of light beings, one by one blink out, and the theater collapses into even more hopeless ruin and, with this image, which looks like a cheesy version of the cathedral and the log house at the end of Tarkovsky's Nostalghia the picture ends.  The final story in the port and harbor-front dives is shot as one continuous, unbroken take, moving through hundreds of yards of alleys and streets, piercing through walls, and dropping in and out of buildings, climbing up from the water-front and all the time encountering changing weather (it drizzles, rains as a downpour, and snows) then, dropping down again and, ultimately, going over water, sea-borne toward the rising sun -- the shot is majestic, but the story is unimposing and trite.  There's some voice-over at the end about the Delirient experiencing 100 years of dreams, apparently the whole history of cinema in the two hours during which he dies.  I suppose one could imagine some sort of meaning to this film, but it would be false -- the movie is built up from visual leit motifs  and such imagery, although, perhaps, poetic, doesn't cohere into any sort of thesis or argument about dreams or movies or human progress and destiny.

I don't like disapproving of this picture, but I think it's technically impeccably and brilliant, but, like some of Salvador Dali's paintings, prepared with genius from the elbow down -- there's no real thought behind the picture and it is intellectually slovenly.