Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: RESURRECTION [Cannes Film Festival 2025 - Cannes, France]

The context of memory is sometimes not as important as image itself which is based in some idea of loss. With "Resurrection" [Competition], the aspect of folklore comies into play through a phantasm who himself is a type of robot it would seem. The progression of his life as it were though is very much organic. He is not a vampire and yet he operates on that same baseline. He sleeps for decades and yet wakes up with no recollection of his own existence per se. Director Bi Gan creates a visually arresting if not specifically confusing tome on what we see versus what we are. The beginning element is an ode to silent film and the way it is constructed with the "mother" moving through scenes is interesting but almost an exercise in the ghosting of an image. It is technically marvelous in certain ways but doesn't truly draw you into the story because it is abstract purposefully.

The second and third acts put the phantasm in question (Jackson Lee) through different incarnations: one as a card shark and one as a mongrel stealing or heisting statues. Both of those sequences are modulations on the notion of the father, and they each have their own interesting perspectives but the story is told in riddles. The lyricism of the image is there but not necessarily the cause or reason. There is an aspect of comeuppance when the head of the family (or possibly even a crime syndicate) tries to call the shark on his play (which is actually done with the aid of a young boy). There is also talk of supernatural powers but mostly it is about slight of hand. In this perspective, one person's ghost is another man's reality. The snowbound monestary in the statue sequence brings to mind "Kill Bill" and others (even "Memoirs Of A Geisha"] but with aspects of "Seven Samurai".

However, the best part of the film that wowed many was an almost 20 minute or longer single shot through an entire sequence including a time lapse. This was the most dramatic, lyrical and at times overplayed sequence but its intention is very clear. It is December 31, 1999 and the narrative of the act is about following the phantasm in another form running through the night after an unknown girl who may or may nor be the missing daughter from one of the earlier stories. This act plays with the memory of the night but also the lurid colors, the perpespective and the music really work together ending with what looks like an impossible stitch but it works until the final moment when it ends. Of course the film likely should have ended there but the epilogue wants to make the point of everything melting away to its base form. "Resurrrection" has its beauty though the sequences seems to exist in riddles and metaphor independently and yet together. The filmmaker has his reasons but sometimes they are less than cohesive. But the one millenium sequence alone is worth watching the film for. Many in the screening had left by this point but that vision of the end says so much about possibility and the context of memory that it almost (but not quite) finds balance with the rest of the film. B-

By Tim Wassberg