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Clarence Tsui

3/5 stars
Eight years on from his critically acclaimed Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a commercial flop, Chinese auteur filmmaker Bi Gan, 35, is back at the Cannes Film Festival with an even more audacious and potentially divisive film.
Dedicated to the French film historian and critic Pierre Rissient, Resurrection is a film made by, and for, hardcore cinephiles.
For those who appreciate early 20th century silent movies and German expressionist cinema, and are into the sport of counting the minutes during long takes, the 35-year-old Bi’s visually dazzling, remarkably ambitious and reference-laden feature will be something to behold.


With its sprawling, near-indecipherable narrative and a lack of clearly defined cultural signposts, Resurrection will prove to be pretty difficult viewing for the casual film-goer.
Hong Kong audiences at least might warm to a brief glimpse of a TV showing a performance by the late Cantopop singer Roman Tam Pak-sin of the theme song to the 1980s TV series The Flying Swordsman.
Comprising five chapters and a coda, Resurrection is the filmmaker’s attempt to celebrate the history of cinema – or, at least, the first half of it – while shoehorning it into allegories about 20th century Chinese history.
Bringing the different parts of the film together is Shu Qi’s narrator, who drives the story along with comments about the passage of time and history. Intertitles introduce Resurrection as a story about “fantasmers” – meaning film-lovers – defying norms by dreaming of something bigger than reality.
Shu herself appears in the film’s prologue as an inventor-filmmaker trying out her image-capturing device and ending up in a chiaroscuro-lit, contorted landscape like those seen in Friedrich Murnau’s films.

As the protagonist of Resurrection, Chinese A-lister Jackson Yee (Better Days) appears as a Nosferatu-like monster in the film’s first chapter, then flexes his acting muscles in scenes with a variety of styles and settings.
In a frenzied, noir-tinged segment set perhaps in the 1930s, he is the wronged man trapped in a showdown with a hard-boiled detective (Mark Chao Yu-ting); then, dressed in a ragged uniform resembling that of a labour camp inmate, he is lectured about transcendence by a deity (Chen Yongzhong).
In the next segment, set in what looks like a colour-desaturated 1980s, he is a leather-jacketed con man offering his supernatural services to a tycoon (Zhang Jijian) seeking reconciliation with his past.
In the final section, set on December 31, 1999 and filmed in a single take, Bi’s trademark, he is a punk fleeing the grasp of a karaoke-owning mobster (Huang Jue) with his lover (Li Gengxi).
Concluding with a futuristic coda, Resurrection is a showcase for the versatility of Bi and his crew. Ironically, a film intended as a rallying cry to support cinema may put audiences off with its impenetrable, haughty tone.
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Shu Qi is the narrator and Jackson Yee the protagonist in celebration of cinema so impenetrable it will deter all but hardcore cinephiles


Shu Qi is the narrator and Jackson Yee the protagonist in celebration of cinema so impenetrable it will deter all but hardcore cinephiles.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Shu Qi is the narrator and Jackson Yee the protagonist in celebration of cinema so impenetrable it will deter all but hardcore cinephiles

Shu Qi is the narrator and Jackson Yee the protagonist in celebration of cinema so impenetrable it will deter all but hardcore cinephiles