Courtesy of Janus Films.

Courtesy of 1-2 Special.

Resurrection/狂野时代/Kuáng yě shídài

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Bi Gan

Dracula

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Radu Jude

Part of a director-focused critic’s duty is to catalogue the development of one’s auteur fétiche, a task which naturally becomes exponentially harder when the director is very much active. As every film appears to bring new developments, it can be easy to either embrace unexpected leaps forward in style and thematic material, or to castigate what feels like a failed experiment, and the possibility of misreading or giving too much leeway to a passing fancy or the embryonic form of a grand new stage in the director’s oeuvre is very high. Regular readers will no doubt correctly note that I tend towards optimism, but the experience of watching such daring films is more often a roller coaster than might be guessed.

Such is the case with two films by major protean talents: Bi Gan’s Resurrection and Radu Jude’s Dracula, which might be an even less logical pairing than normal for me. But to lay out a few baseline similarities: both are films that approximate an anthology format, using many different aesthetic and narrative modes across close to three hours, and both happen to feature vampires and cardboard cutouts as extras in some capacity. Additionally, though this is much more true of Dracula, there is a certain degree of dissent that’s not uncommon with regards to assessments of their work, but feels significant in the face of what might prove to be a new stage in their respective bodies of work.

Of the two, it’s safe to say that Resurrection has been much longer in the making and (with all respect to Jude) more fervently anticipated. Bi Gan’s short career has yielded no fewer than three of the signature films of the century so far, with his debut Kaili Blues (2015) and follow-up Long Day’s Journey Into Night acting as something of a conscious, discernible evolution in scale and technical accomplishment, wedded to a clear cinephilic temperament and intuition for how to incorporate a mélange of influences into his explorations of memory and dreams. Though Long Day’s Journey Into Night received its share of skepticism over a perceived repetition and emptying out of meaning (a sentiment that has only intensified with Resurrection), such a reading leaves out the ineffable nature of its emotional undertow and strange, unplaceable figures, where the experience of adriftness is articulated with astonishing beauty.

In that sense, Resurrection isn’t too far a diversion, though in most other respects it registers as a startlingly new tack for Bi. Instead of the fairly neat halves of his previous two films, it takes place over five (or six) parts, each corresponding roughly to a different time period and filmmaking style across China in the 20th century and named after one of the senses. The plot, despite its already earned reputation as abstruse, is skeletal when viewed from a macro vantage point, though Bi’s revisions to the film after its Cannes premiere don’t make things any easier. In a future where people are able to stave off death by not dreaming, a few people—called Deliriants, though they were previously referred to as Fantasmers in the Cannes translation—refuse to do so, with one in particular (Jackson Yee) hunted by an entity known as the Big Other (Shu Qi). Once she finds him in a 1920s-fashioned silent film setting (vision), the Big Other takes pity on the Deliriant, allowing him to relive a few more memories: a wartime film noir (hearing), a 1970s-era haunted temple (taste), a 1990s slice of neorealism (smell), and an end-of-the-century long take (touch) akin to Bi’s previous feats. After that, she seals him away in a coda that, like the others, does not have an onscreen title, but is referred to in the credits as consciousness.

While Resurrection is perhaps too unruly to achieve the crystalline beauty of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, I say this without hesitation: the first twenty minutes form one of the greatest sequences I’ve ever seen in a film. The inspiration is unmistakably Méliès, with a marked hat-tip to “The Sprinkler Sprinkled” thrown in, but it seems to incorporate Feuillade, Murnau, and even a distant magician like Raúl Ruiz into its endless series of tricks, sleights of hand, and raw artifice. Not coincidentally, it’s also the sequence featuring Shu Qi, who is otherwise mostly present during voiceover interstitials between chapters and the coda; no disrespect at all to Jackson Yee, who is phenomenal in the film and adeptly embodies each of his wildly different characters, but his already significant star power does not compare to the wealth of film history Shu brings to her part. In a pivotal moment, it is her gaze that simultaneously vanquishes and frees the Deliriant, in a moment that can genuinely stand up to Vertigo‘s opening credits. Bi incorporated some of the same silent film grammar into his excellent short “A Short Story” (2022), but the awe inspired here, all impossible locations and novel staging, is something else entirely. The only thing holding me back while watching was the nagging thought: “There’s no possible way this can be sustained.”

Indeed, Resurrection doesn’t attempt to stay in this vein, and yet the film only becomes more cryptic the more it goes along. At a Q&A I recently moderated with Bi, he intimated that his interest was in the time periods first, fitting the aesthetics to be appropriate for the eras rather than the other way around, and that only makes the purposefully off-kilter execution of aesthetic styles more fascinating (no doubt accentuated by his exclusive use of digital). The film noir section almost feels like a one-upping of Zhang Yimou’s Shadow, taking that film’s nearly monochromatic palette in more expressive sections, while the haunted temple seems to resemble a then-contemporary iteration on King Hu’s Legend of the Mountain (1979) in its matter-of-fact depiction of a spirit. The most straightforward and longest section is perhaps the most complex, as the story of a sometime pickpocket and the orphan girl he takes under his wing seems to meld the styles of both Fifth and Sixth Generation films, featuring a certain commitment to their more straightforward narrative mores that nevertheless doesn’t fit easily into either category, though Jia Zhangke’s debut surely was on Bi’s mind. And the long take, which Bi says was not meant to shot in that form, of course could not have been achieved in anything close to its present form pre-Y2K. It differs from its forebears in terms of its distinct inhabitation of several predecessors, even utilizing a red filter at certain points to decisively break away from Yee’s perspective, and its sense of time is more unified even as it breaks that rule in one, truly dazzling moment.

The coda might be the most mysterious element of a film overflowing with shadowy aims and glorious murk, and it’s once again worth considering Resurrection‘s Chinese title, which translates to “Savage Years.” Despite the final images, a truly heartbreaking and keening evocation of all that might be lost without the cinema as a place and an ideal, Resurrection is not at heart a film About Cinema; in some ways Long Day’s Journey Into Night‘s astounding 3D transition better gets at that ideal. Instead, it’s a reflection of a series of changes, fundamental shifts in perception that require radical alterations to capture them in imagistic form. While it might be a mad thought to want to inhabit those worlds once more, they can offer such wonders, grounded and otherworldly alike, that Bi is capable of delivering with aplomb.

If Bi’s aims can be often productively hidden, Radu Jude’s are more open than ever with Dracula, an explosion of excess in the form of roughly fifteen chapters of wildly unequal lengths, all dealing in some way with the legend of the vampire and the tyrant that inspired him. Putatively, they are the creation of an unnamed director—Adonis Tanţa, who appears to be doing a quite accurate vocal impersonation of Jude’s own high-pitched voice—who, tasked with making a commercial Dracula film and out of ideas, decides to ask an artificial intelligence named Dr. AI JUDEX 0.0 for ideas, which frequently involve some degree of sexual or violent crassness. Between all these segments runs a story that the director is particularly invested in, involving two performers in a Dracula-themed cabaret who decide to leave their poor working conditions, only to be hunted across Cluj by a horde of angry spectators and employees.

It would be easy to dismiss Dracula for a host of reasons: its heavy use of artificial intelligence, albeit never for photorealism; the sometimes lugubrious pacing, such as in an adaptation of the first Romanian vampire novel which runs a good uninterrupted 40 minutes by itself; the idea of the AI generating stories and images as an excuse for sloppiness (like Kontinental ’25, this was also shot on an iPhone, often in more low-light conditions. But, as is increasingly the case with Jude’s work from Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn on, he seems to defy traditional qualitative standards, something signposted by his frequent citation of Ed Wood in relation to this film. Wood is not mentioned, though Murnau’s Nosferatu and Coppola’s Dracula both get individual send-ups, mixed into a stew of citations including critic Neil Young appearing as a British tourist who keeps bringing up films while chasing down the performers.

What might be most instructive in discerning Dracula‘s considerable qualities lie in the two sections that most deviate from the film. One is an adaptation of a classic Romanian romantic novel that is played almost completely straight, including an abrupt tragic ending, were it not for the obvious AI images meant to show the passage of the seasons. The other is a coda where the director asks for a dramatization of a news story representing modern times; the AI responds with the story of a garbage worker trying to attend his daughter’s participation in a school event. Both of these segments could likely be the basis of other more mediocre works, but placed into the same conversation as considerably more vulgar objects inherently leads the viewer to question the methodologies by which one perceives the value of a particular art or story. Jude takes shots at a whole host of issues, including the nationalistic undertones of Dracula’s Romanian identity and capitalism’s (here literal) bloodsucking of its worker’s labor, and yet it all sums up to a much wider appraisal of myth as a vehicle for entirely unexpected sociopolitical forces. Much, much messier than Jude’s other recent work, Dracula nevertheless finds insight in its own madness, mirroring the wild world we live in, whether we like it or not.