Get the latest gossip
‘Resurrection’ Review: Bi Gan’s Extravagant Act of Surrender to the Seductions of a Century of Cinema
In 'Resurrection,' Chinese director Bi Gan creates a phantasmagoric head-trip that follows a dreamer through five stories told in five cinematic styles.
This section is also the most exquisite showcase of Liu Qiang and Tu Nan’s baroquely ornamented production design, as this time the Fantasmer is an outright movie monster, a kind of Nosferatu-meets-Quasimodo, and the world he is hiding in is like an ornate dollhouse diorama of a chinese opium den, complete with stop-motion wood-cut puppets in the background. But turning a corner, it is now a German expressionist maze of canted angles and shadows, through which Shu Qi dances like Moira Shearer in “The Red Shoes,” while the “Vertigo” love theme — or a stretch of M83’s bravura, chameleonic score that sounds incredibly like it — creates an obsessive romance between the monster and the woman sent to kill him. The Fantasmer shows up 30 years later as a worker abandoned in a ruined Buddhist temple, where he encounters the Spirit of Bitterness (Chen Yongzhong), who has been hiding in his rotten tooth, in a loosely taste-based fable that plays like a Chinese folk tale of trickster deities pranking a hapless victim.
Or read this on Variety
