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\n\tArguably the worst film in competition in Cannes<\/a> this year is a strong candidate for the festival\u2019s Best Director prize, and rightfully so. The follow-up to 2018\u2019s Un Certain Regard entry Long Day\u2019s Journey into Night \u2014 which asked viewers to don 3D glasses for its spectacular climax, an unbroken, hourlong tracking shot \u2014 Resurrection<\/a> is both breathtaking at times and airless at others. During the first press show the aisles of the screening room resembled scenes from Otto Preminger\u2019s Exodus, and it was hard to tell how many of those who stayed in their seats were even conscious of that fact. It will have its admirers, for sure, and at least 40 minutes of it are pure visual genius, but it\u2019s hard to imagine a more willfully obscure movie that\u2019s been shown here since Wong Kar-wai\u2019s 2046.<\/p>\n \n\tBi Gan<\/a> is certainly a stylist, and the film luxuriates in that, starting with a fabulous opening sequence that\u2019s rather let down by wordy, pretentious title cards that posit a world in which nobody dreams, and, as a result, they live forever. There are, however, holdouts; called \u201cfantasmers,\u201d they refute the fakery of the \u201creal\u201d world and prefer to live in fantasy, which leads to a short life expectancy (the film compares them to candles that do not burn and hence \u201cexist forever\u201d). This is complicated by the introduction of \u201cThe Big Others,\u201d who police the fantasmers and \u201ckeep time linear.\u201d Yes, you read that correctly, no, it doesn\u2019t really make much sense, and, sadly, neither does it ever.<\/p>\n \n\tThe film begins with an extended prologue, in which a woman \u2014 named only as \u201cshe,\u201d and apparently a kind of Blade Runner figure \u2014 enters the dream realm in search of a fantasmer who lives in a what appears to be a spacious nuclear bunker. He looks like Nosferatu and is surrounded by other relics from silent cinema, like a big Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s moon. The woman captures him and releases him into the outside world with a very obvious refence to the Lumiere brothers\u2019 1895 short The Sprinkler Sprinkled. From here, we\u2019re off to the races, with a series of extended tableaux that offer diminishing returns.<\/p>\n \n\tRELATED: <\/strong>CANNES HUB \/ Photos, Cannes Studio & More<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n \n\tThe first is the most promising, a weird meta gangster\/serial killer thriller, in which the fantasmer is chased by the police for a random murder. It involves mirrors, a theremin, the music of J.S. Bach and a suitcase that can end war. While completely baffling, it has an otherworldly charm that is utterly missing from the next sequence, in which a man clearing a temple comes face to face with his toothache (\u201cThe spirit of bitterness\u201d) that seems to have erupted from a stone Buddha. Next up is a con-man story, in which a card shark befriends an abandoned young girl and trains her in deception to fleece an old man. Finally, we have New Year\u2019s Eve 1999, and a young couple who are waiting for the end of the world. The girl might be a vampire, and \u2014 who knows? \u2014 she may well be.<\/p>\n \n\tRELATED: <\/strong>\u2018Sound Of Falling\u2019 Review: Mascha Schilinski\u2019s Superb Feature Is A Masterclass In Ethereal, Unnerving Brilliance \u2013 Cannes Film Festival<\/a><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n \n\tWhile the visuals are endlessly inventive, the narrative is simply just endless; none of these vignettes seem have any plot or resolution whatsoever, which is certainly cool as a concept but not so much fun to watch. Themes bubble up, but they almost instantly disappear; there are nods to film noir (including an explicit reference to Jean-Pierre Melville\u2019s The Samurai); the card-grift sequence seems to channel both Paper Moon and Takeshi Kitano\u2019s Kikujiro; while the final stretch would appear to be an homage to Godard\u2019s famous maxim that \u201call you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThis could all be pie in the sky, and it probably is, but it\u2019s likely that Bi Gan doesn\u2019t really have anything that specific in mind, since the film is constantly in dialogue with the viewer, talking to us directly. In that respect, Resurrection (whatever that title really means) is oddly liberating, being a film that \u2014 it would appear \u2014 operates on dream logic and leaves interpretation up to the individual. It would be nice, though, to be thrown a bone once in a while. Bi Gan seems to know this and rubs it in right at the end with a joke about the film\u2019s 155-minute running time, which seems to the fantasmer \u2014 as the narrator says \u2014 to last 100 years. As the old saying goes, many a true word\u2026<\/p>\n \n\tTitle:<\/strong> Resurrection
Festival:<\/strong> Cannes (Competition)
Director-screenwriter:<\/strong> Bi Gan
Cast:<\/strong> Yee Jackson, Shu Qi, Yan Nan
Sales agent:<\/strong> Les Filmes Du Losanges
Running time:<\/strong> 2 hr 35 mins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Arguably the worst film in competition in Cannes this year is a strong candidate for the festival\u2019s Best…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123931,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[55087,5839,6639,77,3943,55088,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-123930","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-bi-gan","9":"tag-cannes","10":"tag-cannes-film-festival","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-resurrection","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114554398574393405","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}