In Search of Lost Time
By Leonardo Goi
New York Film Festival 2025:
Resurrection
Dir. Bi Gan, China, Janus Films
The phrase “a love letter to cinema” has grown ubiquitous, a label manufactured by studios and publicists to celebrate self-reflexive works that would rather treat the medium as a museum than a space for revelation. Ostensibly designed to trumpet the magic of films, the entries into this micro-genre all too often wind up looking inward, unambitious and lazy retreads rather than journeys into uncharted waters. That several reviews out of Cannes applied the same tag to Bi Gan’s Resurrection says a lot less about the film than it does about the ever-tightening link between marketing and criticism. Bi’s works—an oeuvre now spanning three features and five shorts—burn with a love for cinema that is neither nostalgic nor self-referential. For all our anxieties around the medium’s obsolescence, the director is moved by an unwavering belief in its subversive powers. Resurrection isn’t a valentine so much as a manifesto, a rousing wake-up call to all that cinema can still do.
Hopscotching across the 20th century and split into five chapters—each centered on one of the five senses and told in a distinct cinematic style—Bi’s latest is his most ambitious and narratively intricate effort to date. In a “wild era,” a title card prophesies, humans have discovered that the secret to immortality is to no longer dream. Still, there are some who’d rather cling to their illusions and live a shorter, brighter life. Co-writing with Zhai Xiaohui, Bi sees these “Fantasmers” as rebels who “bring chaos to history” and “make time jump,” and he pits them against vigilantes known as “Big Others” who can tell truth from fiction and must awaken the daydreamers to keep chronologies linear. Resurrection concerns one such Big Other (Shu Qi) and a Fantasmer (Jackson Yee) who’s been hiding from her in what Bi dubs “an ancient, forgotten past: that’s film!” From the opening shot—in which the frame catches fire to reveal an audience staring back at us before a policeman arrives to kick the crowd out of the theater—cinema is thus identified as both an anachronistic art form and a disruptive force. If Resurrection never registers as a mere eulogy, it’s because this conspiratorial quality permeates the entire journey.
Yee’s Fantasmer is a shapeshifting protagonist. In the first chapter, centered on sight and mimicking the aesthetic of silent cinema, he’s a cross between Nosferatu and Quasimodo. Having tracked him down the basement of an opium den, and moved by his words (“Illusions may bring pain, but they’re incredibly real; I’d rather die than go back to that fake world!”), the Big Other grants him a gentle death, prying open his back to reveal a projector and shoving a reel of celluloid that sends him on a final voyage through moving pictures. Next, he’s a mysterious young man in a WWII-set noir who’s accused of murdering another by stabbing his ear with a fountain pen (hearing); thirty years later, a worker stranded in a derelict, snow-capped Buddhist temple haunted by the Spirit of Bitterness (taste). Time speeds up. In the fourth segment, twenty years after that wintry fable, the Fantasmer returns as a con man teaching a child how to fake a supernatural ability to guess the cards from a deck through smell; in the last, set on New Years Eve, 1999 and orbiting touch, he’s a gangster with peroxide blonde hair who becomes smitten with a young woman who may or may not be a vampire. He’s never kissed a girl, she’s never bitten anyone; designed as a 36-minute unbroken shot weaving around a dank, caliginous city, the episode swells into a swoony romance.
Tethered as each might be to an individual sense, the film’s chapters all stimulate several simultaneously. The first, for one, casts its spell not through sight alone, but through the intoxicating alchemy of its German Expressionist scenography and the Chopin waltz Shu Qi dances to as she moves across it. As the Fantasmer reappears in his subsequent reincarnation—a noir storyline concerning a murder, a missing suitcase, and a theremin—there’s a moment when the whole frame starts to quiver to the sound of the instrument, as though a lake ruffled by the wind, suggesting a kind of haptic connection to the screen. Resurrection teems with similarly astonishing flourishes. Shot by Dong Jingsong—who’d previously lensed Bi’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018)—the whole film seems drunk on its ability to entrance. Mirrors abound, giving way to some dizzying compositions, including a scene modeled off one from The Lady from Shanghai (1947); aside from Bi’s now trademarked oner, split diopters and dolly zooms crop up amidst Dong’s sinuous camerawork.
And yet all the technical wizardry doesn’t register as ostentatious. “The world has already collapsed,” a late title card warns, but Resurrection is no dirge; there’s palpable joy in the way Bi composes his jaw-dropping shots. Official budget estimates are yet to be released, though it’s safe to say the director has never worked on such large scale, and he seems determined to make the most of the bigger means at his disposal. Production designers Liu Qiang and Tu Nan assemble some exquisite backdrops—among them, the opium den is an ornate, M.C. Escher-inspired dollhouse complete with shadow puppets—while M83’s swelling, strings-heavy score occasionally elevates the film to some otherworldly realm. Resurrection doesn’t sustain that note as effortlessly as Bi’s feature debut Kaili Blues (2015) and Long Day’s Journey into Night; instead of transcendence, the film more frequently evokes a sort of cornball majesty. But there’s an earnestness to the project that ensures none of it comes across as overly sudsy or trite. Bi isn’t (just) flexing his knack for standout scenes, but communicating a genuine excitement for all the illusions the medium can spawn.
The downside to Bi’s filmmaking is that you can often register the bricklayer efforts that went into triggering wonder right when you should be experiencing the wonder itself. In interviews, the director has cited Hou Hsiao-hsien and Andrei Tarkovsky as his two lodestars, but where their works conjure awe in a way that feels wholly organic, with Bi it’s the product of meticulous calculations and fastidious choices. This is why his signature move—the long take—is so electrifying. Planned and rehearsed as they are, these complex sequences are also when his films are most vulnerable to the unpredictable. Resurrection’s oner is shorter than its counterparts in Kaili Blues (40 minutes) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (an hour-long 3D traveling shot that sent the camera down a cable tramway and into a maze of dilapidated buildings). But it’s no less impressive, not least because the segment seamlessly shifts between different perspectives: those of the Fantasmer, his flame (Li Gengxi), and a local thug (Huang Jue). In retrospect, however, it is not the dexterous movements that linger, but the instances when their design threatens to unravel, as when Girl (Guo Mucheng) and Fantasmer hop on a barge to sail upstream at dawn, but for a while Yee struggles to keep the boat straight. It’s in these moments, as Bi melds choreography with spontaneity, that Resurrection is at its most alive.
In both Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey into Night, these staggering, uninterrupted sequences resulted in a kind of asymmetry, retroactively dwarfing all that came before them. This isn’t the case in Resurrection—not just because the unbroken chapter isn’t significantly longer than those preceding it, but because it feels wholly in service to the story. Bi’s latest follows a man who’s been sentenced to death and spends his last two and a half hours cradled in an illusory universe. Which is to say that Resurrection’s overarching topic is time itself—more specifically, the difference between how that’s experienced in the “real” world and its more distended and elliptical flow in cinema. Late into the young lovers’ New Year’s Eve meanderings, Dong’s camera lingers on a street party. While time-lapse attendees move in fast motion, a black-and-white silent short—Louis Lumière’s L’Arroseur Arrosé (1895)—plays at normal speed in the background. The short barely lasts a minute, yet the scene drives home a point Resurrection has intimated throughout. If we can’t stop time, cinema can give us a way to cheat it and burrow deeper into our imaginary lives onscreen. This is why the phrase “a love letter to cinema” is so frustratingly reductive; in Bi’s hands, the medium isn’t a moribund art but a magic trick. Several times in Resurrection that “ancient, forgotten past” seems suddenly alive to infinite possibilities—much like the world must feel to the Fantasmer and the girl he’s fleeing with, kissing as the ship floats into the first dawn of the new millennium.