Resurrection: dreams unlock new social and political realities in Bi Gan’s hypnotic century-spanning travelogue

Here’s a devil’s bargain: give up the ability to dream, and you could live forever. In Resurrection, Bi Gan’s first feature in seven years and his most head-spinning work yet, that’s the deal taken by everyone except a handful of ‘deliriants’, who insist on clinging to the world of unconscious visions. A stylish gumshoe (Shu Qi) decides to seek out one of these refuseniks, but to find him she must first enter a bygone era of cinema. She locates the chronic dreamer after projecting herself into a Chinese hybrid of Fritz Lang dramas, Lotte Reiniger fairytales and the kind of opium-den fantasies Hollywood cooked up between the wars. To give him the kind of send-off he deserves, she opens up his ribcage and inserts a couple of spools and a reel of 35mm, which then begins to play.

This kicks off the second chapter in a six-part, century-spanning travelogue in which the Deliriant (played by the actor and pop star Jackson Yee) cycles through six distinct cinematic eras, adopting a wildly different guise each time: a troubled young theremin player, a former Buddhist monk, a middle-aged swindler, a small-time hoodlum in search of love on the last night of the second millennium. Perhaps ‘Reincarnation’ would be a more apt title than ‘Resurrection’, but in any case Bi’s preoccupations seem not so much religious as formalist; the film distinctly recalls Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, which similarly hopscotches through a range of literary sensibilities under a playful meta-narrative.

The film seems suffused with the surrealist belief in the power of dreams to unlock new social and political realities; and in the first chapter, with its intricate set design, delirious in-camera effects and fascination with mirrors and portals, one of the spirits most keenly felt is that of Jean Cocteau. But Bi himself has done more than any filmmaker this side of David Lynch to capture the peculiar logic and feeling of dreams – and to insist on cinema itself as the ultimate collective delirium. His previous feature, Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018), culminated in an hour-long one-take shot, filmed in 3D, that seemed to break new ground in the transportative potential of cinema; structurally, the sequence is a film within a film, but no other movie has made me feel quite so convincingly like I’m in someone else’s dream.

Long Day’s Journey seemed designed to make us feel the very workings of time and memory in ways that get under our skin. Resurrection is more interested in ideas, and more explicitly a paean to the art of storytelling, though its homages to cinema don’t always come off. Aspect ratios mutate faithfully throughout, though the sequence with the theremin player – a noirish 1940s-set piece with undertones of espionage – is shot digitally, in colour, rather than on film or in black and white. In consequence, it feels more like a modern-day period movie than an evocation of an era of cinema, despite a hall-of-mirrors scene that tips its fedora to Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947). 

The story about the fallen monk does not feel as though it refers to any particular period in film history; nor does the hornswoggler’s tale, seemingly set some time in the 1980s, though the segments together convey a subtle sense of spiritual decline, disillusionment and petty opportunism. So perhaps Resurrection has more to say about 20th-century Chinese history than cinema history. But don’t think too hard about the self-reflexive framing and you’ll be drawn in by Bi’s knack for vivid, unpredictable storytelling, with Dong Jinsong’s cinematography and M83’s hypnotic, shape-shifting score taking their cues from the director’s versatility. You might call it a feast for the senses, except that Bi makes each chapter revolve around the destruction or perversion of a different sense. The theremin player stabs himself in the ear; a thief pees on a stone Buddha, then asks the monk, who is none the wiser, to locate the bitterest stone by taste; the con artist teaches an orphan how to cheat at cards by using her nose. As for sight, that’s the sense that sets this whole whirligig in motion: the Deliriant’s love of dreaming – that is, our addiction to cinema – can only end in death. (If that all sounds a bit heavy, Bi is having a gas: he makes sure to include what might be the most philosophical fart joke in film history.)

Between each chapter is a brief shot of a wax candle melting. This is both a callback to the opening titles, in which the analogy of a burning candle is used to explain how dreaming hastens our own death, and an image of combustion – one of the film’s key motifs. Each chapter includes fire in some form; the movie opens with a hole burning through the screen, allowing us to see an interwar Chinese movie audience peering back at us. The excitement of this image is mirrored but subverted by the film’s melancholy final frame: as the credits roll, we watch a cinema and the waxwork audience inside it catch fire and melt away. This recurrence of flames in the film resists easy interpretation, but it put me in mind of Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Cure (1997), in which a murderous hypnotist spellbinds his victims by playing with a lighter. Bi, too, is interested in the hypnotic potential of flickering images – the dangers and the delirious joys they might bring.

He should know: he can hypnotise with the best of them. The final narrative segment sees Bi flexing his command of the sinuous single take, in this case a mere half-hour. Our Deliriant, in his final guise as a hoodlum named Apollo, heedless of the looming threat of the Raincoat Gang and its mysterious leader, falls for a young woman (Li Gengxi) in a port city drenched in rain and red light as 1999 turns into 2000. The lovers wind up on a boat that sets off down the river, its sense of momentum providing a neat emotional ending for a film that (like the filmmaker) never stops moving forward.

 ► Resurrection is in UK cinemas 13 March.