Review: Resurrection

Image courtesy of Janus Films.

A valuable lesson in filmmaking: Just because something worked once doesn't mean it will yield the same results each time. This certainly applies to Bi Gan's "Resurrection," the director's first picture since 2009's dreamy and transfixing "Long Day's Journey Into Night," a film that used dream logic to tell a twisty, noir-like story.

The director's previous efforts - the naturalistic "Kaili Blues" and the visionary "Long Day's Journey Into Night" - announced the arrival of a major filmmaker. "Resurrection" certainly lives up to the ambition that one might expect from the director. It's a two-hour-and-40-minute dreamscape filled with some of the most mesmerizing imagery you're likely to see this year.

But while "Long Day's Journey," much like the most fascinating dreams or best surrealistic films, wasn't entirely meant to be comprehended, the viewer was well rewarded for giving in to its dream-like logic. "Resurrection," on the other hand just feels confusing, disorienting, and hard to follow, despite it being filled with some breathtaking shots.

The film, which opens in a movie theater in which the picture's audience is staring out at the audience watching it, is set in a future in which imagination - or to be more exact, dreams - are in peril. Humans have discovered that the lack of dreams leads to immortality - later in the film, these people are represented as actual vampires - but a subset known as the "deliriants" continues to dream, knowing that in response their lives will be shorter.

The movie follows the story of a deliriant played by Chinese pop star and actor Jackson Yee who goes from dream to dream after a woman (Shu Qi) places a film projector inside him. From there, I can't logically fit all of the film's various narratives together until the end, when the deliriant goes up against a group of gangster vampires.

Regardless that the film is challenging to follow narratively - and feels a bit too long, as opposed to "Long Day's Journey," which was long but did not feel so - it is filled with stunning cinematography (a long tracking shot through a rainy, muddy alleyway) and captivating scenes (a shootout in a hall of mirrors). There's also a subplot about a con artist and the young girl who he enlists to help him cheat people at cards. 

Gan is a talented director with a clear vision, even if this time it didn't translate as well - at least, for me. This film is nothing if not ambitious - it's a science fiction movie, a surrealistic dreamscape, at times a monster movie, a crime drama, a noir, and a romance. It is also, if one is to consider that the film opens and closes in a movie theater (the final shot is among its best), a movie that compares the experience of cinema to a dream. But while Gan's previous two films were ones to love, this is one more to admire, if not fully endorse.