“Cinema is alive, Bi Gan reminds us, and cinema will survive if we just let the dreamers, the filmmakers, the cinephiles, if we just let them have their dreams.”

Cinema. The dream factory. The medium that can make time go backward or speed it up forward, that can make time come to a standstill. The medium that can take us to other times, other places, as if in dreams. In a time where dreaming is almost forbidden or at the very least frowned upon, thank the cinema gods that there are still people like Chinese helmer Bi Gan who dare to dream, who dare to see cinema as a language to convey emotions and senses. Creating an ode to cinema and a century of its history, elegiac in form and tone but paradoxically conveying that cinema is still alive and will survive us all, Resurrection uses form and (sometimes confounding) narrative to deal with the transient nature of life; perhaps that is why it feels like an elegy. But with boldness and great sensitivity, Bi Gan has jolted cinema and its transcendent power back to life in an era when, here on the Croisette too, the scourge of social realism is felt.

In a time when people live forever by having stopped dreaming, there are still a few who defy eternity by dreaming. These ‘fantasmers’ are rare and sought out, almost as if their dreaming is a crime. A woman (Taiwanese actress Shu Qi) follows the trail of one such dreamer to an opium den; she is a ‘Big Other’, sent to hunt fantasmers like some veritable Blade Runner, but when coming face-to-face with the monstrous figure she pities him. In Resurrection‘s 20-minute opening sequence, silent cinema with a hefty dose of reference (Méliès and Murnau’s Nosferatu, to mention a few) is revered in its low frame-rate, German Expressionist glory, colored in with just the right amount of saturation to recreate Asian cinema of the era, while also not shying away from some Python-esque animated humor.

The woman takes the fantasmer home and gives him the chance to dream up a century of cinema, the mechanics of which alone show an imaginative flair not seen elsewhere here in Cannes. His dreams will take us through four more movements, each set in a specific time period of the 20th century, through the dominant styles of cinema of those times. That leads us to a noir story in which a police investigator tries to get to the bottom of a murder and a mysterious suitcase at the heart of the case. He has the murderer (Jackson Yee, who plays the lead in all four stories), but is grappling in the dark for a motive. A piece of music plays a key role, Bach’s Come, Sweet Death, music that will return as a motif in the later stories. All of them deal with death in one way or the other, so the recurrence makes sense. All of them also have one of the senses as a central element, sound being the one in this gloriously lit noir, where pierced eardrums allow for a way to escape one’s own reflection. Mirrors are often a motif for mental disintegration, and Bi Gan creates one of cinema history’s great ‘house of mirror’ scenes to guide the inspector’s descent into madness.

Taste is the sense in the second story, that propels us a couple of decades forward to a small temple setting clearly inspired visually by the great masters of Japanese cinema of the ’50s and ’60s. A ‘mongrel’ leads a team of religious art thieves to a remote, snowed-in temple in the mountains. As the men load their truck up with Buddha statues, the ‘mongrel’ is forced to stay the night at the temple. A terrible toothache plagues him, but a bit of temple magic relieves him of the source of his pain. As he balls the tooth up in snow and tosses it over the temple’s wall, the tooth comes to life in the form of a Spirit of Bitterness, in search of Enlightenment. The spirit looks a bit dishevelled, in his wife-beater shirt and stubble on his chin, but through the man that conjured him up he reaches the enlightened state he is looking for. Sadly for the other man, this turns him into a true mongrel. The most cryptic and confounding tale of the four, this part is best enjoyed for Bi Gan’s acute sense of composition and blocking, creating striking visuals using some of the temple’s religious symbols and architecture.

As the dog lumbers off into the dark, the viewer is transported to the ’70s and ’80s, the golden age of Hong Kong cinema. A man arrives at a bus station and finds a bundle of money, but gets shafted out of it by a local crook. It makes no matter, because he plans to fleece a local bigwig, the Old Man, out of a large sum of money using card tricks. He enlists a young girl whom he trains to recognize cards by smell. The scam is successful, even if the mobster tries to trick the girl, but in staying true to the archetypical anti-heroes of this cinematic era, the man loses his money and his life, though not before revealing to the audience the story’s main secret through a bank note.

When we move to the literal fin de siècle, New Year’s Eve 1999, the film not only references in style contemporary Chinese cinema (especially the ending, as if plucked from a Jia Zhangke joint), but is also fairly self-referential. Returning to his cinematic sleight-of-hand from Long Day’s Journey Into Night, whose second half was a ridiculously long one-shot that notably also followed the protagonist in a dream-like state, Resurrection‘s final tale is another 35-minute tracking shot in which the seams are a little bit easier to spot than in 2018, but still display a virtuosity seldom seen in cinema. Yee and Chinese actress Li Gengxi form a pair of lovers on the social edges of an unnamed city. He is supposed to catch a boat at 7 AM, she wants to see the sunrise for reasons that will take us all the way back to Nosferatu from the start of the film. Cinema likes to be self-referential, and as her motives are revealed at the end of the long scene the story develops a tinge of melancholy also present in Murnau’s masterpiece. In one breathtaking moment during this long take we look through a window out onto the street. Suddenly the characters hanging out there start to move at breakneck pace, as they put up a makeshift projection screen. As Lumière’s L’Arroseur arrosé comes to life on the white sheet, played at regular speed while the world around it moves at a much faster pace, we are brought back to the moment when that lady at the beginning of the film, who turns out to be the mother of the fantasmer and the proprietor of a theater, brought her son to life and set him on his journey through cinema. The film briefly shows a riff on Lumière’s short film, considered the first fiction film in history.

Bi Gan is clearly a student of cinema, with the many references (and reverence) that make Resurrection a cinephile’s dream. But the deeper message of the film, about the transportive qualities of cinema and how we should never stop dreaming, is poignant and resonates deeply in the film’s coda, as the fantasmer’s journey comes to an end. A wax movie theatre, dilapidated and missing half a room, is slowly filled up by bright figures, unrecognizable but unmistakably human. As the screen tells us we have reached the end of our cinematic journey, the theater and the fantasmers inside melt away, but the screen stays up, unbothered, untouched. Cinema is alive, Bi Gan reminds us, and cinema will survive if we just let the dreamers, the filmmakers, the cinephiles, if we just let them have their dreams.