Resurrection
Kuangye shidai
Savage Age

Chinese writer/director Bi Gan follows up his hypnotic but gimmicky dream film Long Day's Journey into Night (2018) with this marvelous dreams-within-a-dream film set in a future where people no longer dream. Jackson Yee plays a "Deliriant," an inhuman creature that retains the ability to dream (in part, I think, due to cinema, though this isn't exactly a picture with a followable narrative). The titles at the beginning explain that Deliriants are beings who retained the capacity to dream after humans gave it up in favor of longevity. Shu Qi plays a woman who can embody visions and is tasked with retrieving memories from this Deliriant's subconscious. The film unfolds in six chapters that flow seamlessly into one another, like a dream.

I was totally enthralled watching this picture, though I occasionally pulled back simply to marvel at how Bi had reinvented the anthology film. "Reinvented" may be too bold a term; there are certainly other pictures of this kind. Still, the subtle way this movie is loosely structured around the senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and perception—how you barely notice that the two leads play different "roles" in the various sections of the movie, and the shifting visual approaches, aspect ratios, and elegant references to (not recreations of) cinematic styles lean into this anthology movie characterization. It's just that few bona fide anthology films are consistently good from chapter to chapter, the way this film is. I'm not entirely sure what the takeaway from this epic feature film is meant to be, but clearly there was a lot about the 20th Century worth escaping from and forgetting; cinema, however, was one of the good things!