Resurrection and Peter Hujar’s Day make ‘slow cinema’ feel anything but long

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Resurrection

Directed by Bi Gan

Written by Bi Gan and Zhai Xiaohui

Starring Jackson Yee, Shu Qi and Mark Chao

Classification N/A; 156 minutes

Opens in select theatres Dec. 15, including TIFF Lightbox in Toronto

Critic’s Pick

Peter Hujar’s Day

Directed by Ira Sachs

Written by Ira Sachs, based on the book by Linda Rosenkrantz

Classification N/A; 76 minutes

Opens in select theatres Dec. 15, including TIFF Lightbox in Toronto

Critic’s Pick

There are movies that are long, and there are movies that are slow.

The former can feel interminable and endless, the sensation of enduring a cinematic kind of solitary confinement, the filmgoer trapped in the laziest and most selfish recesses of a director’s mind. But a slow movie, well, there are unique pleasures to be found in a story that takes its time, that luxuriates in the all-too-regular rhythms of the world, that captivates the audience without making them feel captured. And just as a “long” movie can make 90 minutes feel like 900, a “slow” movie doesn’t necessarily have to be a load-bearing three hours plus.

Two new movies opening this weekend define this ideal slow-cinema philosophy, even if they take radically different approaches.

In Resurrection, the latest drama from acclaimed Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan, the audience is submerged into a grand and layered dreamscape in which they can feel all of the film’s magnificent and dizzying 156 minutes. But in Ira Sachs’s far more intimate, far two-hander drama Peter Hujar’s Day, the film feels so unhurried and leisurely because it is working against the constraints of its relatively brief 76-minute run-time.

For Gan and Sachs – who, coincidentally, are both releasing their latest works under the same Janus Films distribution banner, patron saint of ostensibly challenging art-house fare – it is not the size of a story but its motion.

Still, in this weekend’s unintentional battle, there is a clear winner for those discerning audiences who value, well, time.

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Resurrection marks Gan’s return to cinema after a too-long absence – it’s been the better side of a decade since the filmmaker dazzled and puzzled audiences in equal measure with his elliptical 3-D drama Long Day’s Journey into Night. Similar to that romantic detective story – which has nothing to do with the work of Eugene O’Neill – Resurrection is a film of layers, both metaphorically and literally.

Opening in a future in which humanity has stopped dreaming – after discovering that doing so allows them to live far longer – curious denizens nicknamed “The Other Ones” seek out the few remaining souls who still dare to dream, called “Deliriants” and resembling deformed monsters. After tracking one Deliriant (Jackson Yee) down, an “Other One” named Miss Shu (Shu Qi) places the rebel spirit into a kind of euthanasian state, his gradual death allowing her to experience the cinematic dreams he’s been projecting inside his own mind.

Gan slices his film into six chapters – one for each of the five senses, the other for the “mind” – which unfold as genre-specific short films. To fully decipher each segment likely requires a deep expertise on the history of modern China, of the technological and aesthetic evolutions of the cinematic medium, and the possession of an all-access pass to Gan’s own singular brain.

But the deeper that Resurrection goes, the more that Gan’s vision delicately, meticulously, and, of course, slowly envelopes you, no matter your level of comprehension. A particular highlight: The second-last chapter, which like the final third of Long Day’s Journey evokes the end of the world (in this case, New Year’s Eve, 1999) and is also filmed in one remarkably fluid “single-take” shot that must be seen to be believed, if not fully understood.

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In contrast, you can walk into Peter Hujar’s Day relatively cold to its background, while also coming out the other end fully in grasp of its subject matter. Set over the course of a single day in December, 1974, Sachs’ drama is adapted from an interview session that author Linda Rosenkrantz recorded with her friend, the celebrated photographer of the title, in which she asked him to recount, in great detail, the events of his past 24 hours in New York City.

And so, the camera simply captures Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) and Hujar (Ben Whishaw) as they talk, and talk, and talk – well, Linda mostly listens, but occasionally she gets some viewpoint in there. But mostly, this is a grand and deft series of monologues about sex and art delivered by Whishaw, who reunites with Sachs after the messy but still heart-racing 2023 love-triangle drama Passages.

Fans of certain actors will sometimes say that they could watch their favourite performers read a phone book and they’d be happy. There are more than a few moments in Sachs’s film that take that joke literally. But in the hands of Whishaw and Hall, two actors who have natural chemistry and possess an easy charm all their own, this is a movie that is more red-hot than Yellow Pages.

While Sachs might have been tempted to physically move the two characters through the city they are alternately waxing poetic on or lamenting, his choice to keep them (mostly) bound inside of Hujar’s apartment pushes the audience to hang on every line reading, every syllable. It can be slow going, certainly, but it’s always rewarding. Pull up a chair, stay a while.