Resurrection [2025]

Resurrection – Bi Gan’s return 7 years after his hypnotic last film Long Day’s Journey into Night – was as much a work of epic thematic preoccupations and stylistic ambitions, as a mind-bending, hallucinogenic and baffling exercise. Euphoric in its formal audacity, and melancholic in its tone, this elegy to cinema was a classic example of a work that dazzles with its visual splendour and scale – especially in how it glides across diverse filmmaking eras and genres, and serves as a successor to Méliès and Lynch – but also exasperates by its elaborate fantasies, flamboyant flourishes and metaphor-filled conceit. Its premise is an alternate world where humanity has sacrificed dreams to live forever. “Deliriants”, consequently, exist as an anachronism, as they secretly dream, thereby gradually withering away by refusing to conform. Sandwiched between a prologue made as an expressionist, sci-fi, silent film revealing a grotesque and dying “deliriant” that’s an embodiment of movies, and an epilogue mourning its death and culminating with “fin de cinéma”, were four compulsively staged dreams. The convoluted first dream was a 1940s noir and espionage thriller about a tormented musician on the run in sin city; the bleakly beautiful second dream, shot in wintry images, was focused on a lost monk in a derelict monastery haunted by his dead father’s ghost; in the picaresque third dream, a con artist takes an orphan girl under his wings to swindle an ageing mob boss; and in the pulsating final dream – spectacularly filmed in a single take and techno colours, thus recalling his previous feature – a self-destructive hoodlum falls for a mysterious girl employed by a violent gangster. Jackson Yee played the mythical “deliriant” as well as its four manifestations.

Director: Bi Gan

Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi/Thriller/Mystery/Experimental Film

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

Black Dog [2024]

 Guan Hu’s bleak and wryly funny redemptive drama Black Dog straddled multiple genres – edgy revisionist Western, reflective state-of-the-nation cinema, sardonic social satire, and heartwarming human-animal buddy film – while delivering this simultaneously epic and intimate tale. It exhibited diverse cinematic influences – Jia Zhangke’s muted and melancholic commentaries on the human cost of China’s rampaging economic progress (the Chinese giant, incidentally, played a notable cameo in it), Kelly Reichardt’s love for oddball small-town outsiders, and Buster Keaton’s droll persona of a flummoxed individual unable to comprehend the world around him – which made it even more absorbing. Set in a derelict ghost town adjacent to the Gobi Desert – filled with deserted houses, inhabited by dwindling individuals existing on the margins and infested by violent strays, and superbly shot in wan yet striking widescreens – on the backdrop of preparations for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it begins on an eccentric note as a ramshackle bus loses control and flips over upon being ambushed by a pack of wild canines. Lang (Eddie Peng), a former stunt motorcyclist and rock guitarist who’s just been released on parole from prison after serving many years for manslaughter, returns to this desolate wasteland that’s changed beyond recognition. There, upon joining a corrupt taskforce formed to free the town of strays – as part of a broader programme to give the place a cosmetic makeover ahead of the Olympics – this laconic bike-riding loner inadvertently befriends the wiry and feral titular dog. Meanwhile, he finds his father – former zoo-owner – drinking himself to death, tentatively reconnects with a beautiful and lively circus performer (Tong Liya) with whom he possibly had a romantic past, and is continually chased by a snake-venom peddler seeking revenge.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Guan Hu

Genre: Drama

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

Caught by the Tides [2024]

 Few filmmakers have so masterfully blended profound socio-cultural upheavals with achingly intimate individual stories, and the inexorable flow of time with stasis, melancholy and transience, as Jia Zhangke. Caught by the Tides – with its episodic structure, zooming in on two outsiders drifting and reconciling over three segments across multiple years, inextricably counterpointed with China’s tectonic mutations – immediately recalled his two previous films Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White. Jia, in a remarkable artistic choice, composed the first two segments by sifting through a thousand hours’ outtakes from three films – as well as deliberately shot additional footage with plans of converging them into a future work – viz. Unknown Pleasure from 2002, his sublime masterpiece Still Life from 2006, and Ash… from 2018; the final segment, shot during Covid-19 pandemic, was the only one filmed in present. Astonishing self-reflexivity aside, this radically conceived assemblage imbued it with fascinating additional textures and subtexts – be it the organic ageing of the two lead actors (Zhao Tao, Jia’s partner and muse, and Li Zhubin), or the changing visuals, viz. grungy and energetic low-fi videos in the first segment, bleak and meditative widescreen exteriors in the second, and recently shot digital images in the third. While it did have a skeletal narrative – a dancer (Tao) and her boyfriend (Zhubin) are separated when he leaves Daton to find work elsewhere; she travels to the site of the Three Gorges Dam to find him; and he eventually returns amidst Covid-19 restrictions – it also possessed long observational stretches and interludes like fly-on-the-wall documentaries and travelogue essays. Incidentally, while the mesmeric Tao hardly ever speaks, the film was a kaleidoscopic compilation of folk, pop and disco soundtrack.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Jia Zhangke

Genre: Drama/Romance/Road Movie

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

Youth (Spring) [2023]

 Shot over 6 years (between 2014 and 2019), and condensed from a staggering 2600 hours of footage into an immersive and observational 3 ½ hour documentary essay – which, incidentally, made this a relatively concise work in Wang Bing’s formidable canon – Youth (Spring) is composed on a canvas that’s simultaneously expansive and intimate, rigorous and free-flowing, focussed and digressive. The first chapter in his planned ‘Youth Trilogy’, it comprises of vignettes stitched into a long-form impressionist reflection on the textile hub of Zhilli – the town, located close to Shanghai, has over 18,000 privately-run workshops catering mostly to the domestic market – where around 300,000 migrant youngsters work. With thematic preoccupations, understated tone and unassuming aesthetics that reminded me of Jia Zhangke’s extraordinary masterwork Still Life, the film painted a picture of grind, compounded by the gritty complex and claustrophobic spaces where they both slog and stay. Yet – and this is what made it such a gently affective exercise – it was never oppressively dreary or pedantic, despite the undertones of melancholy and urban desolation. Rather, it’s easy, organic, lively, jaunty and even hopeful at times, as we see kids in late teens and early 20s horsing around, flirting, indulging in silly and carefree frolic, acting like cool hipsters, lip-syncing to bouncy pop music (played at the shop-floors to alleviate monotony), creating pipe dreams, having relationships, and building camaraderie, despite the grimy environs and exhausting labour. Yes, they also recognize the exploitation and participate in collective wage negotiations with their stuffy bosses, even if these end in futility. What emerged through Bing’s empathetic gaze on a slew of individuals, was a vivid, kaleidoscopic and eloquently real portrayal of community and life in action.

Director: Wang Bing

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

Long Day's Journey into Night [2018]

 New Age Chinese filmmaker and poet Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is a work as much drenched in bold expressionistic flavours and fatalist atmosphere, as it’s awash in moody poeticism. Consequently, with its meandering structure, obtuse narrative, wry monologues, dream-like palette and oblique cinematic references, it’s closer to a hypnotic tone poem – the kind that one “experiences” rather than “comprehends”. And, irrespective of whether one finds the director’s formal experimentation as avant-garde and brilliant or self-conscious arthouse showboasting – or a mix of both – there’s no doubting its visual splendour and technical virtuosity. The languorously paced storyline is about Lou (Huang Jue), a weary man with a shady past, who’s returned to his grungy hometown of Kaili after many years on the occasion of his father’s death, in order to search for Wan (Tang Wei), an enigmatic and irresistible femme fatale from his past who continues to hold deep sway on his mind. Thus he begins a journey that’s as much in the specific milieu of Kaili as it’s into his memories, fantasies and subconscious, thus making this romantic neo-noir a strangely intriguing watch. In the melancholic first half –ravishingly composed and hauntingly scored – he reminisces about an old friend who was murdered, visits his last surviving family ties to a small restaurant that his father used to run, and encounters people from Wan’s elusive past and present as he’s increasingly enmeshed in memories of her. And, in the inexplicable 2^nd half, it suddenly shifted gears by embarking on a bravura, astonishing one-hour long single take sequence, and the jaw-dropping audacity of this tracking shot (filmed in 3D) might well be the film’s raison d'être itself.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Bi Gan

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Neo-Noir/Romantic Noir

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

Mountains May Depart [2015]

The canvases for Jia Zhangke, chronicler of the China’s incessant sociopolitical transitions, are usually at once grand and intimate, and that holds true for Mountains May Depart too. However, the final segment in this episodic film was a departure as it focused on the diaspora population, and that made it bit of a mixed bag by his stellar standards – compelling and poignant for two-thirds, but tad stilted in the end. The fist chapter, set in the dreary coal mining town of Fenyang in the Shanxi province in 1999 – as Hong Kong is on the verge of changing hands – and shot in the flat aspect ratio of 1..33:1, portrayed a love triangle involving Tao (Zhao Tao) who has a layered friendship with soft-spoken coal mine worker Liangzi (Liang Jingdong), and the brash businessman Jingsheng (Zhang Yi) who starts pursuing her aggressively. In the second episode, set in 2014 and shot in widescreen ratio of 1.87:1, Tao is now a successful businesswoman whose life gets shaken by two developments – the return after many years of a severely ill and impoverished Liangzi; and a brief visit by her 7-year old son Dollar, from her broken marriage to Jingsheng, for her father’s funeral. The final chapter, set in Sydney in 2025 and shot in ultra widescreen ratio of 2.35:1, Dollar, who’s now an estranged young guy with faded memories of his mother, starts a Freudian affair with his middle-aged professor (Sylvia Chang). Tao was magnificent in the first two chapters which were laced with loneliness and melancholy, while Jia made lovely use of the disco track Go West, especially in the magical and heartwarming final shot where it plays to Tao’s impromptu solitary jig.

Director: Jia Zhangke
Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Family Drama
Language: Mandarin
Country: China