New York Film Festival 2025 - Second Dispatch

Resurrection (Bi Gan) 

The marketing and wide release in China of Gan's previous feature, Long Day's Journey into Night (2018), hoodwinked the moviegoing masses into thinking it was a romantic comedy instead of a drifty art film. Box office figures plummeted after its New Year's Eve opening night and the hashtag "can't understand Long Day's Journey Into Night" started to trend. We'll have to wait to discover if Resurrection (the Chinese title is different and translates as Savage Age) will meet the same fate when it hits general release. I myself felt snookered by the NYFF blurb promising a film "unfolding over five chapters that feature a dazzling array of styles and genres." As with Long Day's Journey into Night and 2015's Kaili Blues, it dazzles, to be sure. Blessed with a hefty budget, a leisurely production schedule (began in 2023, a workprint barely made it to Cannes this May), and superstars Jackson Yee and Shu Qi, Gan indulges in a feckless extravagance. He takes on the entire history of cinema with Caligari and Nosferatu nods, time jumps, and a climax comprised of yet another of his characteristic long-takes, this one lasting 30 minutes. All of this takes place in some sort of time-space continuum in which, as we are told in periodic titles, dreams either no longer exist or are somehow rendered illegal. A band of rebels called Fantasmers still dream, though, including one Frankenstein monster type (Yee) equipped with a film projector in his torso during an early silent sequence. He then reappears in various guises throughout that array of styles and genres.

As you might suspect, none of the above adds up to much in narrative terms. It sustains on mood and visuals alone. I just wish I got the buffet promised. Most of the vignettes traffic in noirish crime and grit which we have a surfeit of on television and in cinema (and in criticism and in academia and...) so lovers of musicals, melodramas, pornography, and westerns are left to f(l)ap in the wind. I also wish I knew what Gan was trying to tell us about the History of Cinema assuming he had any clear viewpoint throughout the two years it took to bring the film to life. And I rue the forthcoming exegeses that will take the framing device too seriously and "explain" how each historical and generic register makes perfect narrative sense, as if that were the heroic goal of all cinema.

Grade: B