A silent movie text card announces: “those who stop dreaming will live forever, just like a candle that stopped burning”. The writing is on the wall: this is a movie about the nature of dreams, and their connection to cinema.
The story begins in the early days of cinema. The “fantasmer” (Zhai Xiaohui) – a seemingly immortal entity representing the spirit of cinema – takes the shape of an ugly beast, roughly something between Nosferatu and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. A woman reveals to the creature how ugly he is by allowing him to see his reflection inside the iris of her eyes. The lines are delivered through intertitles. The mise-en-scene and the texture of the images vaguely recall Georges Melies, if in plush technicolor. Next the fantasmer gets lost in smoke and mirrors. Literally. This is an apparent tribute to German expressionism.
Abundant allegorical devices, excessive lighting and a good amount of blood populate the rest of this two-hour-and-40-minutes flick. Thirty-five-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan proposes to take viewers on a journey through the history of cinema. Film becomes a proxy for the human imagination. Sadly, the oneiric becomes soporific, as the incomprehensible storyline and repetitive visuals transport viewers safely into the arms of Morpheus.
The texture of the images changes as the film moves forward in time. A few decades later, and the settings look like they were taken from a Neo-noir movie, with the elusive fantasmer elegantly booted and suited (still played by Xiaohui), in yet another barely coherent subplot. Images of fire and a melting candle more or less serve to break the film down into chapters. The screenplay was written by the director Gan himself.
The story wraps up in the year of 1999. Everything in lit in bright red (a nod to Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern, from 1991?). Our shape-shifting protagonist is in love with a woman. She confesses, “I’ve been dead for a long time, I’m a vampire”, before engaging in kissing and bloodsucking. She also tells him: “I’ve been here for two hours and a half, while you’ve been here for more than 100 years”, presumably in reference to the duration of the film. The story ends with some mawkish CGI, while a voiceover delivers the message in utterly didactic fashion: “cinematography is the language that I speak in order to talk to you”. Metatextual silliness in its most pure format.
Almost the entire film feels like it was made in a large film studio. Of course it is not possible to establish this with certainty, as the effectiveness of the studio relies on the negation its own existence (unless the film is metatextual or experimental). In other words, audiences are not supposed to realise that the scenes were shot in such confined facilities. The fact that Resurrection is indeed a metatextual movie (ie a film about cinema) could justify the highly confected aesthetics. That is: as long as you think that cinema is synonymous with studio shoots. It is only in the last half an hour that a meandering steadicam showcases the streets of a Chinese city, revealing some more authentic sites, and recalling the kinetic energy of Bi Gan’s far more impressive Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), which also premiered in the Official Competition of Cannes.
Resurrection has more in common with Zhang Yimou’s awful One Second (2021), another pretentious Chinese tribute to cinema with a very large budget and lame imagery. Both films were heavily state-sponsored, opening with a prominent seal of approval from the government. Unsurprisingly, neither movie contains any subversive devices and political undertones. This is heavily sanitised cinema and geopolitical propaganda, intended to promote China as a film powerhouse. It is too elliptical and uninspiring for mainstream audiences. China is set to overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy in the next decade or so. It will take a lot longer for Chinese cinema to catch up with Hollywood.
Resurrection premiered in the Official Competition of 78th Cannes International Film Festival. The UK premiere takes place at the 69th BFI London Film Festival.
