The poster should say "It's about a bunch of stuff, no, really!"
狂野时代
Kuángyě Shídài
dir: Bi Gan
2025
Well. That was…something.
Something extraordinary. I have not seen a film like it, I think, probably ever.
That’s not necessarily a good thing.
Resurrection is quite a baffling movie. It might be because it’s really 6 short movies wearing a trenchcoat and hat pretending to be one movie. I don’t know the origin of this flick or how this director operates generally, so I wonder whether the whole production was planned out the whole way, or whether it’s become this out of necessity. Even directors as celebrated as Davids Lynch and Cronenberg have had to reconfigure their projects sometimes cobbled together into movies when they started as series and then funding was pulled.
But there is an overarching story being told (I think?), a theme being played out, something about the senses, and there’s something about history, and the history of cinema, and dreams.
There is some entity, referred to as a Deliriant, who dreams when others have given up their dreams for immortality instead. And it’s happening in a silent movie? And the Deliriant eats a bunch of poppies? And has like a film projector inside his heart?
And then there’s a story about some guy maybe driven mad by a sound, or someone’s voice. Someone maybe was murdered, and a suspect (Jackson Yee, who also plays the Deliriant), being tortured. I wasn’t sure who was doing the torturing, whether it was cops or secret police or someone even worse. There is something said about the Japanese, so maybe it’s the 1930s – 1940s. Is it spies? Is it wartime traitors? I have no idea. People get stabbed in the ear, or stab themselves in the ear, some guy plays the theramin.
Then the older guy stabs the younger guy, which definitely, totally, no way is that intended homoerotically, and then it’s on to the next story before the bafflement truly sets in.
A former monk (Jackson Yee) helps jerks steal buddhas or parts of Buddha statues at some abandoned temple up on high in the mountains. He has a sore tooth. A voice tells him to find the most bitter rock he can find, and then belt himself with the rock, to get the tooth out.
He licks some rocks, belts himself, throws the tooth away, and then a chap turns up. The chap looks like his father. This makes the ex-monk uncomfortable because he has regrets he has to confess, and he really misses his dad’s snoring, for which he organised a premature cessation, it seems. Guilt leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth.
The third sequence is maybe set in the 70s, and is a scammer’s delight. A con artist (Jackson Yee) who wants to run more cons wants a partner. He finds an orphan child (Gu Mucheng) and trains her in the art of bullshitting others, but also tries to convince her that he has psychic powers just like some guy on the television doing his best Uri Geller impression.
Uri Geller was an infamous bullshit artist who used to go on all the tonight shows, talk shows, every kind of show trying to convince the dulled masses that he genuinely had psychic powers. He’s still peddling his bullshit today, by saying he used his powers to destroy the peaceful Gaza flotillas that the IDF brutally attacked for no good reason. But enough of that crap.
As this section seems to be about the sense of smell, the girl at first pretends to be able to ‘smell’ what card someone is holding, but later on seems to be able to smell the writing in a letter that’s also been burned. People are scammed because they want to believe, that is our weakness, and that’s the weakness scammers exploit to devastating effect. Also, directors are kind of scammers, tricking us in the audience because they know what we yearn for, and they figure out ways to deny us and keep us on the hook or give it to us good and proper until we regret ever asking.
It should be a crime to make films with multiple characters longing for their absent fathers. It’s too, too painful.
The next sequence is set in 1999, and this is done as a one-shot capture, with no obvious edits, even as there’s a sequence with time lapse which easily could have had a multitude of edits. Otherwise, it’s a fairly baffling bravura sequence on the cusp of the new millennium, as a rascally youth (Jackson Yee) trails after a beautiful young woman, from a bridge through a town through businesses and into a nightclub. It’s amazing, a truly phenomenal sequence, but / and unfortunately it has vampires in it as well. I have no idea why there are vampires in this sequence, but it is whatever the fuck it is. At the end of the sequence, on a boat, as dawn’s light approaches, I have no idea what happens to these characters but at least they’re together. Besides wanting to see the sun come up, I have no idea which of the five senses this segment is meant to map on to. It possibly doesn’t matter.
The last we see someone (the great Shu Qi) turns that last character into the Deliriant, and then inters him in a vault, and then the film ends with some silent movie era title cards saying how everything with a form is an illusion
And that’s that. If I’ve made it sound like a baffling, perhaps irritating, perhaps aggravating experience, then, wow, finally I’ve succeeded at something in my life. There is no doubting it’s an extraordinary looking and sounding movie. The use of so many different film techniques and styles contributes to the dreamy, hallucinatory effect of the flick, in the same way it jumbles stories and narratives and types of narratives. The sound and music also contribute to that, meaning, yes, I am still completely mystified as to what the point really was.
Films don’t have to mean anything. Films can mean lots of things. If you see their sole purpose being to entertain people, well, I cannot say that this is an entertaining film with a clear idea and a satisfying, predictable storyline, and emotional beats you can set your watch to. I would gather that the vast majority of audiences who watched this in Chinese cinemas probably demanded their money back (how it made $20mill at the Chinese box office I will never know. I’ve seen what movies are most popular there, and it ain’t baffling multi-threaded epics about film history with sly references to China’s last century of overabundant historical occurrences).
I would not have thought there was much of a market for Bi Gan’s work, but then no-one ever accused me of having my finger on the pulse of what’s cool or what isn’t across the phantasmagorical continent of Asia. Maybe there are a bunch of people who love getting stoned and watching movies that don’t make much sense, linear or otherwise.
If this was seen by more people in Western art houses, well, I am one of those people who patronise such establishments with my presence, and there’s not a living soul I would recommend this to, because it’s just so out there and feels so random. I would be worried that someone I recommended this to who isn’t a stoner would hurt themselves trying to make it make sense in their brains.
And last I checked I’m neither a stoner nor a neurologist, much to my mother’s lament. So if I say I enjoyed watching this movie, which is almost three hours long and felt closer to five, you don’t have to take that with a grain of salt; you just have to accept that I am a jaded and cynical person who has seen too many films for my own good, and I have a pretentious streak a mile wide, so when something completely outside of any mould or template comes along I tend to rate it highly solely out of novelty.
I happily and bravely admit I don’t understand a tenth of what the director is trying to say with the overall structure, but I enjoyed the amazing visuals in most of the stories, and cared somewhat about what was said in the dialogue, but there isn’t a single second of acting I would point to as being good or great, even if it was okay. This isn’t a film where I noticed the acting, even if there are actors in every single scene. I guess the thrill for me was more in the craft on display in putting this all together, whatever the bewildering purpose might have been in the minds of the makers.
Of the individual sections or sequences, I never really felt the engaged by the plots or the performances, but I guess the one I connected to the most was with the con artists in the 70s. There’s just something about that era, about people missing / resenting their absent dads, about the rat cunning of these desperate deviants.
And then it ends and you’re like “okay what’s next?” That’s both the problem and the opportunity presented by anthology type movies.
There is a lot of art here, high art at that, and it’s not for mere mortals like me to question the motives of the talented people involved, but I honestly would love to see an interview with the guy that played the leads throughout all the sequences being asked what he thinks it was all about, and have him come back with “fucked if I know” after a couple of artful drags on a cigarette.
That would be so neat.
8 times it’s not so much a Resurrection as it is living and dying 24 times a second out of 10
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“What is it that, once lost, you can never get back?” – I'm sure the answer is meant to be "time" but I dunno what happened to my virginity, it must have gone somewhere? - Resurrection
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