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Resurrection is available to purchase on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Bi Gan

FEATURING: Jackson Yee, Shu Qi

PLOT: We follow five dreams of a “Deliriant,” a man who chooses to dream despite a futuristic ban on the practice.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Bi Gan dreams better than you do.

COMMENTS: According to Resurrection, the secret to immortality is to stop dreaming. Dreamers, the prologue explains, “bring pain to reality and chaos to history.” Yet despite the obvious benefits of ceasing to dream, some rebels—“Deliriants”—continue to do so, secretly. They are tracked by “the Big Others,” agents who can see through illusions, enter dreams, and gently bring the Deliriants back to reality (i.e., death). Resurrection tracks the dreams of one such Deliriant, who somehow hides inside film, and the Big Other who gently guides him towards fatal reality.

Our Deliriant’s dreams glide through movie history. After intertitles explaining the premise, Resurrection opens with the viewer traveling through a hole burning through a celluloid membrane, that opens onto a cinema whose occupants stare in wonder at us intruders until policemen roughly usher them out the exits. The line between us and the dreamer thus blurred, we travel through five dream stories. Each is organized around a different sense, and each is set in a different cinematic era, floating from silent movies to film noir and ending in 1999’s millennial panic. Some (especially the first) are exceedingly strange. As we travel we will encounter opium addicts, hard-bitten theremin-playing detectives, former monks, con men, gangsters, and vampires, with opening and closing doses of the mysterious Big Other and her esoteric rituals. It’s like a universalized version of Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, and less uneven than most anthology films. Bi Gan’s style benefits from shorter formats. His previous slowcore stories sometimes drifted too far from their narrative anchors, but with the longest entry here being only about 30 minutes, it’s easy to focus on each tale in its entirety before resetting our attention on the next.

But we do not watch Bi Gan movies for the stories anyway. We watch them for the masterful visuals and the “how’d he do that?” camerawork. Although each installment has its own charm, the director puts the fireworks right up front, with a mysterious cinematic prologue which, like the opening of Holy Motors, nods at the movieness of it all. It segues seamlessly into the first dream: having spied an opium poppy hiding in the Deliriant’s eye when examining at his photograph through a microscope, the Big Other wanders silently down Caligari stairwells and past Metropolis machinery and through a storeroom with a Méliès moon until she uncovers the Deleriant, looking like Max Schreck suffering from the plague, offering up a plate of poppies that bloom in stop-motion. Stylistically, this sequence is more avant-garde than anything Gan has tried before: Guy Maddin by way of Andrei Tarkovsky. The other fantastic sequence comes in the last dream, which is another of the director’s celebrated, complicated single takes, following two lovers from a harbor through busy rain-slicked city streets into a karaoke bar and then back to the harbor, where they board a boat and sail off to sea. The shot takes up 30 minutes of screen time, but there’s a time lapse inside the sequence that means the camera actually filmed for much longer.

When is a dream not a dream? When it is a metaphor. Bi Gan’s dreams in Resurrection are metaphors, most obviously, for cinema; the Deliriant’s reveries progress chronologically through different cinematic eras. But falling deeper into them, they are also a complex symbol of the human spirit, that spirit of individualism, imagination, and chaos that opposes religion, politics, and often good sense, yet remains essential to our being. Resurrection is a quiet act of rebellion. Nothing in it directly challenges the status quo, so it is not only acceptable to the ruling party, but even useful as a global prestige item. But the Deliriant’s tragic soul is forged in defiance. And though he must die for it, even the Big Other must honor that spirit.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a cavalcade of strange images that take the language of cinema into [Bi Gan’s] sleeping fantasies and bring it back more vibrant than ever.”–Richard Whittaker, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

Resurrection (Criterion Premieres) [Blu-ray]

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