"It's ambitious to make a movie about how making movies is like harvesting dreams, projecting viewers' inner lives back at them, often to visceral, abstract, and sometimes tummy-hurting ends. This is ambitious for even the director of Long Day's Journey into Night, a puzzling 2018 noir that concludes with a 56-minute continuous-shot meant to be experienced in 3D, and Kaili Blues (2015), which boasts its own 41-minute unbroken take. To say the least: This is not easy shit to pull off."
"That's right, we're feasting on concepts here. I'm comfortable mixing metaphors, because Resurrection mixes senses, charging the realm of sight and sound with synaesthetic ardor. In five unreal vignettes, loosely assembled as dreams within dreams-or simply just one dream contorting and transforming into the next-Bi attaches film genres and archetypes to stories with an intent to engage the senses beyond those an able-bodied person typically uses to watch movies."
"Just as, in one segment, a scuzzy con-man (Jackson Yee, who plays a different character in each dream) teaches a little orphaned girl (Guo Mucheng) how to count cards by smelling them, so does Bi compel viewers to taste the film, to feel it. It's all an illusion; the girl can't actually smell the identity of playing cards. Still, amidst the smoke and mirrors of cinema, Bi can trick the audience for a few hours into accepting the reality of whatever surreal logic is presented."
Bi Gan stages Resurrection as a sequence of five unreal vignettes that flow like dreams within dreams. The film uses long continuous takes as a structural and sensory anchor, following a visual lineage from Long Day's Journey into Night and Kaili Blues. Synaesthetic techniques charge sight and sound to prompt taste and touch sensations. Jackson Yee appears in multiple roles, and a scene features an orphaned girl taught to count cards by smelling them. The film intentionally blurs illusion and reality, inviting viewers to accept surreal logic and to experience cinema as an embodied, multisensory apparition.
Read at Portland Mercury
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