23/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: Bi Gan’s spectacular dream-fugue aims to resurrect the history of 20th-century cinema, one era at a time

One of the most fascinating moments so far in Chinese director Bi Gan’s short, but eventful, career was the domestic release of his second film, Long Day’s Journey into Night [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]. Its local distributor came up with a great piece of marketing spin: give audiences the impression it’s a dreamy, “couple-friendly” romance and release it on New Year’s Eve. Box-office receipts flowed in, with the hostile reaction on Chinese social networks, angry at its incomprehensibility, having an impact as a PR coup.

Additionally, it’s safe to say that Bi’s army of cinephile admirers would also fail a surprise post-screening test on his movies’ events. Enjoying and loving them, but with meaning chimerically dancing out of sight – that’s not far from another Cannes hero, David Lynch, and with the surrealist master’s recent passing, Bi has returned in timely fashion. Baffling and mesmerising many across its screenings yesterday, the long-awaited Resurrection [+see also:
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film profile] has premiered in competition at Cannes, with it only having wrapped principal photography weeks ago and being fully completed days before its unveiling.

A true “millennial” cineaste born in 1989, Bi wears his compact but rich array of influences on his sleeve. True to its French co-production involvement, Resurrection feels like his even more sprawling, romantic and pessimistic riff on Holy Motors [+see also:
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interview: Leos Carax
film profile], moving through different segments with the lead, Jackson Yee, as a “Fantasmer” (as Bi’s invented sci-fi glossary of terms puts it), who takes on various personae in dream levels resembling both the past century’s cinema and generations of modern Chinese history. Hou Hsiao-Hsien regular Shu Qi is the “Big Other”, who surveils the Fantasmer’s progress and tries to save him, although she’s sympathetic to his marauding in the dream world.

If the narrative particulars, and even stakes, of the film’s initial chapters don’t connect easily (on first viewing, we may add), a sense of haunting melancholy flourishes from the off. In the film’s possibly post-apocalyptic “present-day” timeline, humans seem to be immortal, for the harsh concession that they can’t dream. The illicit Fantasmer chooses to dream, and explores both individual and the collective unconscious, whilst accelerating the shortening of his life (visually analogised, beautifully, as a melting candle) and causing temporal “chaos” in the eras visited, like a Chinese avant-garde Back to the Future.

And so, silent cinema, wartime film noir, Buddhist heritage and Matrix/Fight Club-like Y2K paranoia (the latter seen in one of Bi’s signature unbroken takes) are all briefly travelled through by the Fantasmer – an undoubted “resurrection”, given that their presence in the characters’ (and perhaps our) minds risks being lost forever. To boil Resurrection down to one factor, Bi – a young man, in love with an art form that many have proclaimed dead – has reanimated what he views as cinema (indeed, no social realism is seen), perhaps to bid it one final goodbye as we move through a 21st century where, as the saying goes, the dystopia is already here.

This earnestness, in addition to the film’s opacity, has definitely been off-putting for early viewers, and makes a strong case for scepticism of Bi’s still-maturing artistic personality. But a cult of viewers far beyond this inaccessible festival are going to adore this feature, and Mulholland Drive-, Memento- and Tenet [+see also:
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film profile]-style spatial plot diagrams will be made. Come on, discover your Bi-sexuality!

Resurrection is a co-production by China and France, staged by Dangmai Films, Shanghai Huace Film Co Ltd and CG Films. Its international sales are managed by Les Films du Losange.