After my last dispatch’s uncommon thematic synergy, I’ve come back with two films that on their face couldn’t be any more different in style and tone. One is a far-reaching work from a Chinese filmmaker already known for his transportive, otherworldly style. The other is a deeply American filmmaker known for his biting sense of humor. Having set up this dichotomy, there are a couple of tangible threads between them. Both directors are working to copy cinematic style(s) and voices from a different era of filmmaking in the hopes of providing an explanation for the randomness of the real world. And neither film is easily definable.
Despite my best efforts, I’ve spent the last 24 hours trying to figure out the best way to describe Bi Gan’s near-uncategorizable cinematic exploration “Resurrection.” Bi’s film doubles as a survey of 20th century moviemaking practices and as a compendium of nesting stories stretched across decades.
“Resurrection” starts as a silent film, wherein intertitles explain the state of this futuristic world where humans have stopped dreaming as a means for living forever. Not everyone loves this breakthrough. There’s a group of people called “Fantasmas,” who prefer to live in a cinematic dreamworld, even if their decision actually disrupts time’s very stability. Combating these Fantasmas are “Big Others.” They’re tasked with waking up these sleeping beings before too much damage is done. During the silent film portion, we follow a Big Other (Shu Qi, who appears in all five of the film’s parts) pursuing a Fantasma (Jackson Yee, who also appears throughout). To add texture to her pursuit, Bi not only makes copious technical references to silent filmmaking, such as color tinting and German Expressionist sets, but also to its filmmakers. There are winking homages to Méliès and Louis Lumière (a gag from his 1895 film “L’Arroseur Arrosé” is pulled into here).
The trippy aesthetic powers the film’s first twenty minutes, wherein this Big Other catches up to the Fantasma. Taken by his purity, rather than immediately killing him, she decides to give him a peaceful death by cracking open his back—where a projector is concealed—and loading a roll of film that’ll provide him with another dream. This time he’s a dashing man in the middle of a wartime spy noir. The film expands from the Academy ratio of the silent era to widescreen, and moves from silent to adapting the Big Other’s narration. This sequence includes plenty of cinematic homages too, particularly a mirror-based shootout recalling “The Lady from Shanghai.”
The film’s other parts are just as imaginative. The third section occurs thirty years later, and features the Fantasma as a looter arriving at an abandoned Buddhist temple where he encounters the Spirit of Bitterness (Chen Yongzhong). Twenty years later, the Fantasma is a con artist who trains a young girl (Guo Mucheng) to smell playing cards for money. In the last part, he is plunged into the 1990s, in a world featuring vampires that mirrors both the works of Wong Kar-wai and Tsai Ming-liang. The highlight of this section is an unbelievable 30+ minute oner that begins as a fight in a karaoke bar before becoming a lovers on the run sprint to the docks, ending as a voyage off into the sunset.
“Resurrection” probably won’t make a lick of intellectual sense to anybody. It’s totally governed by dream logic. But the film makes perfect emotional sense as a displacement of anxiety via disassociation. In Bi’s picture the emotional violence of reality can be escaped, the darkness is always followed by a glimmer of light, the bitterness by a sweet taste. His worlds are filled with wonder, from the stylish set decoration and designs to the unencumbered movement of the camera. A transcendent vision, “Resurrection” seeps so deep into the marrow, that it lives boldly between each breath you take.
“Honey Don’t” is a tricky little picture. Ethan Coen’s slight yet jumbled 90-minute escapade tries to recapture the charged atmosphere of “Drive Away Dolls,” but only moves forward in fits and starts. Some of that is intended: this is meant to be a convoluted noir, the kind of the B and C-level stuff whose illogical ending and random narrative swerves happened in service of providing enough runtime to be a vehicle for whatever star was attached to it. But oftentimes, the film’s dulled wit and unmemorable characters instead plays like someone trying to copy a Coen moving rather than being one.
Similar to Coen’s other films, “Honey Don’t,” which he co-wrote with his wife Tricia Cooke as the second installment of their lesbian B-movie trilogy, opens on an unlikely twist of fate when a client of private investigator Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) dies in a gruesome car crash. Despite the protestations of dimwitted homicide detective Marty Metakawitch (Charlie Day), a shrewd Honey doesn’t believe this was a simple accident. She begins investigating, zeroing in on local narsassistic cult leader Drew (Chris Evans) as a potential suspect. Along the way, other troubles step into Honey’s path: Her niece (Talia Ryder) goes missing, her father arrives to make amends, and other dead bodies turn up at grisly murder scenes. She also begins dating MG (Aubrey Plaza), a taciturn cop with an oddball edge.
Though “Honey Don’t” possesses a few good running bits—such as Day’s Marty not understanding that Honey being a lesbian makes her unavailable to him—there’s scarcely any snap or bite to the dialogue. Even when Coen and Cooke turn to the former’s common archetypes, such as slow-speaking, unassuming salt of the earth characters (the film is set in Bakersfield, California), an ingredient appears to be missing. The lack of punch is so severe, I actually went back to see the movie again—a rare decision at a film festival—just to make sure that listlessness wasn’t on the part of my tiredness.
“Honey Don’t” also suffers from the same ailment faced by “The Ladykillers”: it’s too little of everything to add up to anything. The pulpy noir elements are probably strongest, if only because Qualley does a strong version of Ida Lupino, speaking with the same kind of undeterred cadence that can sharpen any double entendre. Plaza, on the other hand, has only one beat to her character—struggling to vary up the timing on an equally thin romance. Evans also appears to be miscast. Though he’s trying to play another sleazy guy in some vain attempt to recapture “Knives Out,” this type of role has stepped below diminished returns. He needs to find another act.
There is some madcap gore to add a little bit of extra spice, but it can’t really help this meandering film. “Honey Don’t” is a major letdown from “Drive Away Dolls,” a film with a real verve to it. “Honey Don’t” is uneventful enough that even calling it a minor work also feels too kind. It’s pretty much a throwaway picture, offering little worth returning back to in the event you see as part of the inflight entertainment library.
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