Bi Gan’s RESURRECTION. Film Is a Dream [REVIEW]

According to Luis Buñuel, film is nothing more than an “awkward imitation of a dream.” The darkness in the movie theater corresponds to the act of closing one’s eyes. Soon begins what Buñuel calls “a nocturnal journey into the unconscious; images, just like in a dream, appear and disappear, interrupted by ‘blackouts’; time and space become flexible, stretching or contracting at will; chronological order and the sense of duration become relative, no longer corresponding to reality.” In his autobiography the director of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie wrote that if he were given twenty more years of life and asked how he would like to spend each day, he would answer without hesitation: “give me two hours of active life and twenty-two hours of dreams.

” Both the main character and the director of Resurrection could easily sign their names under that statement. In the case of Bi Gan, fascination with the poetics of dreams is not only evident, but also consistent. In his previous film, the much-discussed Long Day’s Journey into Night, this fascination manifested itself primarily through an experimental device that surprised viewers about halfway through the screening. The protagonist goes to a cinema, unexpectedly falls asleep during the film, and his tangled dream takes over the narrative, pushing the actual plot out of sight. In Resurrection, Bi Gan goes a step further. He builds the structure of his 160-minute work from five novellas connected by the figure of the dreamer, the so-called “phantasmats.

” The narrative frame, sketched out in a few suggestive intertitles, introduces us to a dystopian reality in which dreams have been outlawed. A few individuals—the aforementioned phantasmats—rebel against this state of affairs. They want to keep dreaming, even at the cost of their lives. When one of them finally appears on screen, it’s hard not to think of Igor from Young Frankenstein. Pale, hunched, contorted in every direction, the character resembles a hungover New Horizons festival-goer stumbling out of the cinema after their fifth screening of the day.

A mysterious woman—seeing the man has little time left—decides to show mercy. She slits open his hunch with a knife—only to find not entrails, but a battered projector, into which she inserts a reel of film. Thus, she grants him one final journey into his subconscious. Buñuel, Lynch, Cocteau. Few surrealists in the history of cinema have understood the poetics of dreams as well as Bi Gan.

The Chinese filmmaker knows, for instance, that dreams always begin in medias res and end without resolution, as if the film in our mental projector suddenly tore. He stages each of his novellas in this exact manner: throwing us into the middle of the action, only to deprive us of a conclusion. Gradually, he binds us to the characters, lulls us into a particular mood, only to flip the board in a heartbeat and rearrange all the pieces. The worlds we traverse with the dreamer are ephemeral but believable, precise, and—above all—remarkably consistent. Bi Gan doesn’t force oddity, doesn’t pack his dreamscapes with countless absurd, incongruous elements in hopes of creating the infamous “surreal atmosphere.

” In doing so, he avoids the trap that almost every inexperienced imitator of Buñuel and Lynch falls into. He avoids it primarily because—despite having made only three feature films—he is an exceptionally mature filmmaker, sensitive to cinematic form and slowly rising to the status of a contemporary master. Surrealism in Bi Gan’s work is also marked by a distinctly self-reflexive, or more accurately, cinephilic character. The journey through dream sequences in Resurrection mirrors a journey through various stages in the history of cinema. From German Expressionism to film noir, all the way to postmodern genre hybrids—most notably, a gangster-vampire melodrama. Bi Gan reveals himself in this journey as a directorial chameleon; a cinematic erudite who handles the grammar of film with the proficiency of a film studies professor. The closer we get to the end, the more brazen and playful he becomes, reaching true virtuosity in the final novella, shot in a single, approximately forty-minute long take. By a cruel twist of fate, I watched Resurrection in immediate succession to Richard Linklater’s New Wave—another film that could, in simplified terms, be described as a “love letter to the cinema.

” The comparison is further legitimized by the fact that both titles competed in the main selection of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Although at first glance Linklater’s and Bi Gan’s films seem to share some common ground, in reality it would be hard to find two more divergent cinematic visions. While the American is content with a clumsy, sketchy portrait jotted in a worn notebook, the Chinese director crafts a monumental fresco in which the mythologized subject is not—as in New Wave—a brilliant individual and their creative process, but rather the entirety of cinema itself, understood as a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. A wondrous invention that enables humanity to dream collectively while awake.

“Film is a dream,” wrote Konrad Eberhardt in the title of his memorable book-length essay, from which I shamelessly stole the opening quote from Buñuel. The distinguished Polish film critic argued in it that there is a deep kinship between the world of cinema and the world of dreams. I don’t know if Bi Gan has read Eberhardt’s book (I assume it’s rather unlikely), but its title could easily serve as the informal motto of his entire body of work. A body of work that is unique—celebrating both dreamers and cinephiles. Because, in the end, is there really any difference between the two?