Resurrection

The act of dreaming is a complicated and oft-misunderstood process. Though it is widely accepted knowledge today that dreams are subconscious experiences that occur during rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, there are no scientific explanations as to why we dream or how we should even interpret our fantasies. We are aware of “lucid dreaming”, but there is no concrete process for how one can acquire that skill, nor do psychosomatic experts have much evidence regarding how our brains access our traumas through nightmares. Therefore, for the vast majority of our history as a human species, our psyche has been examined mostly through the medium of art. From Poe’s famous A Dream within a Dream and the Bard’s delightful comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Akira Kurosawa’s transcendent Dreams to David Lynch’s beautifully surreal Mulholland Drive, artists have always used their work to express their deepest, most emotional aspects of their lives in the unexplainable worlds of their reveries. Bi Gan’s long-awaited return to cinema after 2018’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Resurrection, is his rumination on the conception of dreams covered in the feverish haze of intense cinematic fervour. It will be the defining work of art of the decade, if not the century. 

The plot to Resurrection is almost secondary to the experience, but the logline is simple: in a world where humans have uncovered the secret to eternal life by not dreaming, there are a dwindling number of individuals who continue to practice the habit of dreaming clandestinely, known in the movie as ‘Deliriants’ or 迷魂者. A creature (Jackson Yee) who lives in these phantasmagoric environments clings to his fantastical landscapes… until a woman (Shu Qi) gifted with the ability to view and experience these dreams appears. Armed with the power of cinema, she peels back the layers that obscure the Deliriant’s true identity and uncovers the verities that lie within.

It feels like a gargantuan, almost Sisyphean task to unpack Bi Gan’s intensely soporific, nauseatingly haunting, and transcendentally transfixing work. He begins the film harking back to the dawn of cinema, with intertitles that flicker and smolder to reveal an audience watching us. Cheeky references to cinema’s new beginnings are found throughout, whether it is the homage to Edward Muybridge and zoetropes in the hallucinatory movements of an opium flower, or the playful impossible gags of Buster Keaton in the woman’s casual messianic powers to transform environments. In many ways, we are watching the lucidity of dream take human form, snatching the elements of control away from us whilst keeping us squarely in sight of our creator. When we dream, we relinquish jurisdiction of our surroundings; we give our subconscious carte blanche to take the form of our deepest desires, and often what results from there is an exponential growth in the heightened forms of our aesthesis. Treated as an anthology work, Bi Gan’s film is a navigational map into the powers of our visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and kinesthetic senses, with each narrative arc of the film a narrative veil that slowly unravels to reveal the profound mystery that is life. 

While he explores the corporeal expressions of our psyche, Bi’s every move is predicated on the genre of a film which his sonoric companion, M83, transposes us to. Whether it is the haunting mysteries reminiscent of Feuillade in his silent film, or the cryptic folkloric tales of bitter stones found in many of Hu’s strangest tales or even the vampiric love story that happens at the dusk of the last century, the score looms large as a spiritual guide to the nether worlds of Resurrection’s realities. From the micropolyphonic textures that evoke the works of György Ligeti to the emanating warmth of romantic nocturnes like that of Brahms, the auditory landscape that echoes is so imminently evocative that an emotional response is immediate. Coupled with the visual language by Dong Jinsong, no film has ever felt so abstractly striking yet so profusely heart-wrenching, as though the soul of our lives flickers gently across the moving screen as a piece of truthful fiction. To fathom it in its entirety is a gargantuan task, but the totality of cinema and dreamscapes is captured with a rocambolesque effervescence that permeates in the film’s emotional textures. Every frame is a new expression, a cinematic landscape that is dominated by the subconscious powers. An interrogation of our being is at stake: who are we truly, what are we doing with our existence, and why are we here? What is the purpose of living when one cannot experience its everyday joys? For years, humanity has been attempting and failing to explain the purpose behind creation. Bi Gan chooses to combine the unexplainable with the unattainable, leading to a cinematic grandeur that catapults the viewer into a frenzied state of eternal being. 

In many ways, descriptive logorrhea is the best one can hope to achieve in verbally comprehending the sheer weight of artistic brilliance Resurrection serves. This is not just a new film, but a new genre of cinema, one where magic coexists with logic, where truth and fiction stand shoulder-to-shoulder, as giantesses of our veracities of being. For a world where humanity has perpetually ceased to find meaning, Bi has done more than simply give the psychosomatic world understanding; truthfully, this depiction of an eternal state of reverie will stand tall as the dawn of a new epoch, a dynasty of fantasia. If there’s a world post-mortem, one must surely hope they reincarnate in a universe as exultingly numinous as Resurrection.

10/10