In an exceedingly rare win for arthouse cinema in China, Bi Gan‘s beguiling drama Resurrection opened at the top of the country’s box office over the weekend, earning a healthy $16.5 million (116.8 million RMB).
The film, Gan’s third feature, was a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival in May, earning rave reviews from cinephiles and winning a “special prize” from the event’s jury, chaired by Juliette Binoche. Janus Films quickly snapped up North American rights and has set a release date for Resurrection in U.S. theaters on Dec. 12.
Resurrection won the weekend over holdover anime sensation Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, which came in second place with $15.6 million. Lionsgate’s Now You See Me: Now You Don’t also made a respectable second-weekend showing, earning $7 million for third place. The two imports have totaled $79.3 million and $34.1 million, respectively, since their launch on Nov. 14, according to data from Artisan Gateway.
Gan sits atop an exceedingly short list of Chinese auteurs who have managed to generate sizable box office sales with works that feel uncompromisingly non-commercial. His sophomore feature, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, starring Tang Wei, opened with a wildly impressive $37.9 million single-day total on New Year’s Day of 2019. The feat was partially pulled off via a too-successful viral marketing campaign that positioned the film as a couples-friendly date-night feature — when it was, in fact, a challenging, 138-minute arthouse work about memory and loss. The film received heavy backlash on social media from viewers who felt they were duped by the marketing campaign, which encouraged mass pre-sales.
But Resurrection‘s robust debut proves that Gan still has plenty of young local fans — and there is still a way for artistically ambitious cinema to win in China’s increasingly commercial and nationalistic marketplace. Ticketing app Maoyan currently projects Resurrection to earn at least $30 million in its home market.
Emerging onto the international scene with his 2015 debut Kaili Blues, Bi Gan quickly established himself as one of contemporary cinema’s most singular stylists. Occasionally likened to his filmmaking hero, Andrei Tarkovsky, the 35-year-old director is celebrated for crafting films that blur the boundaries between time, memory and dream, expressed through a meditative command of image and rhythm. Long Day’s Journey Into Night pushed these preoccupations to new extremes with its celebrated final hour — a continuous, 3D long take that enveloped audiences in a trance-like flow of longing and repetitive dream logic.
Upon its premiere at Cannes, Resurrection was hailed as Gan’s most conceptually ambitious film to date. Structured around six chapters, each dedicated to one of the senses — vision, sound, taste, smell, touch and mind — the film is at once a sensory odyssey and a meditation on cinema itself. Starring a transmogrifying Jackson Yee and a radiant Shu Qi, Resurrection tells the story of a spectral entity known as “the Phantasm,” who journeys across time through various cinematic styles, from silent film to film noir to the recent present, culminating in a sequence that could be described as something like an existential effervescence. The work is shot through with poignant visual metaphors for mortality and the transitory power of images.
As The Hollywood Reporter‘s critic put it in Cannes in a rave: “Reflecting on the seventh art’s past, present and possible future at a moment when many believe it to be in its death throes, Bi Gan has crafted a time-tripping, genre-jumping paean to the big screen in which he revives the films he loves and then buries them a second time over — hoping, perhaps, to resurrect cinema in the process.”
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