Bi Gan

7.4 Kaili Blues (2015)
7.5 Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018)
7.0 Resurrection (2025)

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Gan Bi (China, 1989 - family name Bi), also a poet and a photographer, debuted with the short black-and-white film Diamond Sutra (2012), aka The Poet and Singer.

Kaili Blues (2015) feels like a meditation a` la Theodoros Angelopulos . The protagonist is a man with multiple missions: to rescue his nephew, to deliver mementos to the lover of his old female business partner, to find musicians who can still play traditional folk music, and perhaps to find someone who wants to listen to his story. His actions are frequently interrupted by poems, and are introduced by Buddha's "Diamond Sutra". The plot is cryptic and confused, to say the least, mixing the linear story of a journey to the protagonist's hometown with legends of wildmen, views of majestic natural landscapes, a quasi-documentary about the humble lifestyle of a rural village, slow train rides, dreams, and clocks (the recurring motif of the film). The camera wanders increasingly at will, eventually indulging in a 41-minute unbroken shot through the narrow streets of a mountain village, following characters up and down the stairs of a village, taking detours into a tailor's shop and a hairdresser shop, and even a boat ride. We are aware of the camera's existence because at one point the camera leaves the motorcycle that is driving around a hairpin, runs down a narrow staircase and catches up with the motorcycle one street down.

Chen is a doctor (probably not a trained one) who runs a shabby clinic with an elderly female doctor in a village called Kaili where the electricity can never be taken for granted. The scene is interrupted to show us Buddha's "Diamond Sutra". Chen is also an amateur poem and reads his poems throughout the film. A TV broadcast talks about wildmen wreaking havoc in the region. Chen visits his nephew Weiwei, whom his father has locked at home. Chen opens the lock and takes the child with him. They confront Weiwei's father, who is playing cards with friends and clearly neglects his son. Chen heard that this brother (nicknamed Crazy Face) wants to move elsewhere and offers to keep Weiwei with him. Chen dreams his mother, while his elderly coworker dreams of the lover she lost in the Cultural Revolution. She knows that he is alive and lives in a nearby village (which seems to be Chen's hometown) but hasn't had a chance to see him again in all those years. Weiwei draws a clock on the wall of his home. The home is a humble building with a giant window on the railway. A long train goes by just outside the window. The TV broadcast again talks about wildmen. Chen stops his motorcycle into a tunnel. We finally see the titles of the film. Chen rides his motorcycle up a mountain road. He visits his mother's grave and burns money on it. Then he rides back into town and looks for his brother. His brother changed the tombstone without asking his opinion. His brother has not forgiven Chen for spending time in jail while he, his brother, was taking care of their mother. Worse: their mother left her home to Chen. Chen's brother is resentful and seems to take his revenge on his son Weiwei. Weiwei has disappeared and his father refuses to tell Chen where he is. Chen overheard that his brother may have sold the kid. Eventually his brother Crazy Face confesses that their friend Monk has taken the kid on a trip to their hometown. This Monk is mentioned as a former gangster, whose son was killed by a rival gang. Chen used to work for Monk. Chen decides to travel to the hometown and rescue Weiwei. His coworker asks him to deliver a few gifts to her old lover. Chen takes the train. Again, we hear a broadcast about a wildman. When Chen arrives in the hometown, we learn that his mother abandoned him as a child, that he was in jail, that his wife is dead. Chen is eager to find musicians who can still play a traditional instrument (the lusheng), but the only extant band is not in town. He hitches a ride on a truck to the town where the band is playing. On the way he sees a man who has been forced to stand in a bucket with another bucket on his head. He was bullied by three other kids. Chen comforts him. The kid gives him a motorcycle ride. The kid is in love with a girl named Yangyang who is about to move to Kaili to become a tour guide. Yangyang is a tailor and fixes a few buttons of Chen's shirt. Then Chen walks into a hairdresser shop. Meanwhile, the camera follows the kid and Yangyang. Yangyang takes the boat across the river and, during the trip, recites the sentences that she has memorized about Kaili (we hear a male voice suggesting them). Then she returns via a footbridge. The motorcycle kid would like to move with her to Kaili. While Chen is getting his haircut, we learn that Monk's son was buried alive, and that he, Chen, spent nine years in jail. Chen sings with a pop band that is performing in the main street of the village. The audience includes the hairdresser and the tailor Yangyang. The motorcycle kid takes Chen to the river and tells him that his name is Weiwei, and that his plan to turn time back by painting clocks on every train. We finally see Monk, the former gangster, an elderly man who is shaving in the mirror of his little van. Chen tells him that he wants Weiwei back. Monk tells him that Crazy Face was selling the boy and he, Monk, offered to buy him. Chen stumbles onto the lusheng players: they are escorting a funeral. Chen takes the train alone, having agreed to leave Weiwei with Monk for a few more days. Chen falls asleep. A train goes by in the opposite direction and we see lots of clocks painted on his cars.

Diqiu Zuihou de Yewan/ Last Evenings on Earth/ Long Day's Journey into Night (2018) mixes the story of a melancholy man who is haunted by the memory of his lost love with the actual memories of what happened to them, and it ends with a dream that reassembles and reshuffles all the elements that have surfaced. The story set in the present is a rather uneventful search for a cynical woman who has been very good at dumping husbands and lovers. The flashbacks instead construct a semblance of a noir movie in which the protagonist met this femme fatale and risked his life only for her to desert him. The story is told in fragments and it is not always clear whether a fragment is happening in the present or in the past, and whether they are shown chronologically. The main confusing aspect of the plot is that we don't know whether Luo's memory works or not, and therefore we don't know whether we have to take what we see literally: two women are played by the same actress (Kaizhen/ Wan) and two more (Wildcat's mother and the madwoman) are played by another actress; but does it mean that they are the same person? As the film progresses, and the protagonist's motives become more clear, we are not even sure whether the protagonist is looking for his old love, for the mother who abandoned him as a child, for revenge (of the murdered friend) or for just a lost period of his past. Note that Luo keeps using his mom's picture to find his lover Wan, because they look very similar. He has been abandoned three times: by his best friend (murdered), by his mother (who left him when he was still a child), and by his lover. He is haunted by all three mysteries.

If the film recalls Andrei Tarkovsky for some of the dilapidated settings, David Lynch for the ambiguity and fragmentation of the storytelling, and Kar-wai Wong for the voiceover and melancholy mood, there is also some Proust in the search for the lost past and some Freud in the way he mixes his mother and his lover, and in the way his subconscious rebuilds his life's story in a mostly rational dream using doppelgangers as powerful symbols.

The last, nocturnal scene consists of one continuous 59-minute take, shot in 3D. This begins when he wears the 3D glasses in a movie theater: basically, he starts watching a movie of his own life... past, present and maybe even future. We are told the same story twice, first in the unreliable form of memory and the other in the even less reliable form of a dream.

On the other hand the combination of real investigation, faulty memories, and dreamed events, when they all viewed as a whole, may provide an accurate depiction of what happened. The protagonist remembers his lover in stages and in layers. By the end we don't know exactly what happened out in the real world, but we have plenty of clues to reconstruct what happened inside him.

In a nutshell, the story seems to be this. Luo returns to his home village after 12 years. He has to attend the funeral of his father but in reality he wants to find the girl, Wan, whom he loved back then. He met her after he started investigating the death of his best friend Wildcat. Trying to locate the killer, Zuo, he met his girlfriend Wan, who looked like his mother, and they fell in love. Zuo had killed someone to protect this girl using a gun borrowed from Wildcat's father and then killed Wildcat (maybe because Wildcat knew his secret). Luo and Wan wanted to run away, but Zuo caught them and tortured him. Luo escaped, Wan convinced Luo to kill Zuo, but then she disappeared. A picture of his mother found in a wallclock (the same picture that he once showed to Wan to prove how similar she looked to his mom) takes him to a woman who is in prison who sends him to a hotel: Wan did hide there and married the hotel owner, but they divorced and she left him (a fact that seems to imply a serial cheater who seduces and takes advantage of gullible men). She is now a singer and a prostitute in a karaoke bar. The bar is about to be torn down and that night they have the last show. Waiting for the show to begin in one hour, Luo walks into a movie theater and falls asleep. Then he has a 59-minute dream in which all these characters reappear in one form or another. Then at the last minute the camera stops in front of the door beyond which the perfomance is about to begin.

The film begins without a title card. The voiceover of the protagonist Luo Hongwu talks about the woman he loves. He wakes up in a bedroom with a woman and admits to her that he dreamed of his old lover, a mysterious woman of whom he doesn't even know the name. Then he packs his bag and leaves. He returns to his hometown Kaili, where his father just died. He hasn't been back in 12 years. He left to work in a casino. His stepmother gives him a broken wallclock that his father loved so much. His father has bequeathed the restaurant to his stepmother and only a derelict van to him. He is haunted by his best friend Wildcat, who was murdered in a mine shaft; and Luo found the gun that killed him. He visits a rundown shack where the ceiling leaks, presumably a place connected with his love story, and opens his father's clock and finds a picture inside, a picture of his mother, who abandoned him when he was a child, as well as a phone number.
The narrating voiceover tells us that, after Wildcat died, he saw his ghost on a train. Luo suspected Zuo Hongyuan, a local thug, of the murder, who had vanished, and tried to find him. Luo found Zuo's girlfriend. She told Luo that she didn't know where Zuo was hiding. Luo followed her while she walked inside a tunnel. He told her that she looked like his mother and showed her the picture of his mother that was in the clock. She told him her name, Wan Qimen.
Back to the present, there's a phone number on the picture and a friend tells him that it used to be the number of a women's prison. He visits an inmate, Tai, and asks her whether she mailed the picture to his father's restaurant. She tells him that she got the picture from Wan and she tells him a story about Wan: that as teenagers they robbed a house and Wan only took a green book, a book of legends. It also contains spells to make a house spin and a spell to fly. Wan was later sold to a man (not clear whether as a prostitute or a wife), while she, the inmate, was arrested with the others. Wan gave her the picture and yes she, Tai, mailed it to the restaurant because it was taken in that restaurant, and she wrote the phone number of the prison in the back. Luo gifts the green book to Tai and leaves. He is already driving the van out of the town home when a cop chases him and gives him a handwritten note from the inmate telling him where Wan now lives, in a hotel disguised under the name Chen.
A friend helps him track down this Chen in a hotel.
A flashback shows us when Wan told him that she got pregnant, to which Luo replied that he could go and work in a casino, and that he wanted to teach the child to play ping-pong. But Wan replied that she already got an abortion because Zuo was coming back. Luo begged Wan to flee with him.
He is driving his van on an unpaved road and is stopped at a police checkpoint.
Another flashback shows when Zuo captured them, hanged him by his wrists and tortured him while singing karaoke, his gangsters witnessing the scene silently.
Luo walks into the hotel and asks about Chen. The owner of the hotel tells him that, when she moved in, she was mysterious. She locked herself in her room and never came out until she ran out of money. Then they got married. Then they got divorced and she disappeared. The hotel owner guesses that he is Luo (which means that Chen must have told him about Luo). The hotel owner says that he doesn't know if what she told him was true or false: she was too good at telling stories. He heard that she now performs in a karaoke show.
Another flashback shows when she asked Luo to kill Zuo: somehow Luo had escaped and she wanted him to ambush Zuo and kill him in a movie theater.
On the way to the karaoke bar, Luo visits a hairdresser who is dancing in front of the tv set. She is Wildcat's mother. It's the first time they meet since Wildcat died. Luo and Wildcat used to work for her. Luo tells her that a mudslide forced them to abort their mission. A flashback shows when the murdered Wildcat was dumped in a cart and pushed down into the mineshaft. She tells Luo that Zuo had borrowed the gun from Wildcat's father to kill the man who wanted to sell Wan (which is presumably the reason that Wan became Zuo's slave, and presumably this man is the same one mentioned by Tai). Luo tells us that, after presumably killing Zuo, when he returned to the house with the leaking ceiling, she was gone, leaving behind the green book. (Having just heard how she took advantage of the hotel owner, we suspect that she had taken advantage of Luo too, having him kill Zuo to free herself).
Following the directions of the hotel owner, Luo reaches a place where a karaoke bar and brothel is about to be torn down. That night the last performance will take place. This is his last chance to find Wan. The owner of the establishment tells him that the show will begin in one hour and advises him to watch a one-hour movie.
He sits in a movie theater, wears a pair of 3D glasses, falls asleep, and starts dreaming. Now (halfway into the film) the title card of the film finally appears, as if this is the title card of the film that Luo is watching, not of the film that we are watching.

His dream (a 59-minute unbroken take, long exactly one minute less than the hour that it takes to wait for Wan's karaoke performance) takes him into a tunnel that connects the movie theater with a mineshaft where he finds a child locked into a closet who claims to be a ghost and named Wildcat. Luo is lost in the maze and cannot find the exit. He burns the picture of his mother and meditates that he is missing the last chance that he had to find Wan. The child challenges him at a ping-pong game. Luo wins and the child accepts to escort him outside. The child takes him on a scooter to the exit and then tells him to board a chairlift that will take him back to the karaoke bar. Instead he lands in a tiny village where a small crowd is watching a karaoke show. He meets a singer who is playing the slot machine and is preparing to go on stage (played by the same actress who plays Wan Qiwen). Luo tells this woman that she looks like the woman he's looking for and she replies that her name is Khaizen. She manages a pool house. She wants to close and go home but t violence to convince them to get out, but the two kids, leaving the place, lock Luo and Khaizen inside. The woman tells him that her boyfriend abuses her and cheats on her. Luo spins the ping-pong paddle that the child gifted him and they fly over the square. She points the house where two lovers used to live. She takes him to the prison gate. Then she walks back to the main square where the crowd is watching the show. A madwoman shows up with a flaming torch, played by the same actress who played the hairdresser, Wildcat's mom. Luo is hiding behind a corner and starts following the madwoman. She walks to an iron gate that is locked. The man on the other side refuses to open because she has just burned down their house. She accuses him of being a liar. Luo joins them, points a gun at the man, forces him to open the gate, and to take the woman back. He talks to her as if she were his long-lost mother (who abandoned him as a child and burned down his father's house). He asks her the most valuable thing she has and she gives him a broken watch. He returns to the square and gives the watch to Khaizen who is about to go on stage. Nonetheless, she takes him to see the house of the lovers and is surprised to see that it was burned down (presumably by the madwoman). Khaizen tells him that he can kiss her if the house spins, and Luo uses another spell to make the house spinning. They kiss. The camera walks outside up the street to the door where she is about to perform. This sequence has lasted 59 minutes and Wan's karaoke show should start now.

The 15-minute short Po Sui Tai Yang Zhi Xin/ A Short Story (2022) is a fairy tale about a cat.

Kuang ye Shidai/ Wild Times/ Resurrection (2025) consists of a prologue, four "dreams" and an ending. So it is fundamentally a film in episodes. There are two protagonists: the "dreamer" who prefers dreaming over eternal life, and the government agent, a woman who is in charge of destroying dreams but eventually is "resurrected" by the power of dreaming. Each dream/episode is set in a different era of 20th-century China, and superficially one can think of it as a set of metaphors about each historical period. But more importantly each of the four dreams/episodes adopts a cinematic genre from that era: noir thriller, folk tale, crime caper, vampire melodrama. And so dreaming, history and cinema become just one element: cinema as a dream machine and as a reflection of history. The six segments also mirror the six kinds of sensation in Buddhist philosophy: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind. Each dream/episode represents the dreamer gradually losing one of these six senses. The first dream (a noir espionage thriller about seeing) is too chaotic and irrational, even for a dream. The second dream (a Buddhist parable about hearing) has a lengthy dialogue that kills the momentum. The third dream (a con-artist tale about smell) and the fourth dream (a romantic vampire story about taste) are more straightforward.
The dreamer re-lives a century of cinema's progress. He is a hunchback like Quasimodo and Nosferatu, but also hides a movie projector in his hunched back. The woman helps the dreamer live one hundred years because that's the span of time of cinema from 1900 to 2000. And so this film becomes mini-compendium of cinematic styles and techniques. The film's central metaphor about the death of cinema is revealed only at the end. The woman who is in charge of discovering and killing dreamers (Shu Qi's character) rediscovers the power of cinema as a portal to "resurrection". But cinema is dying anyway, melting away in ruined buildings. The woman guides the dreamer through history and cinema like Beatrice guided Dante through hell, purgatory and heaven with a final goal of rebirth.
Despite the ambitious theme, the film is mostly a display of virtuoso, oneiric and opulent cinematography. Bi is a con-man making a film that is just an accumulation of cinematic tricks.

The film opens with a silent prologue. The intertitles inform us that sometime in the future people have stopped dreaming as the condition for living forever. Some outcasts still prefer to dream and they are called "deliriants". We then see a celluloid film on fire. In the hole that emerges we can see a movie theater of the early 19th century, full of people who are staring at the hole, i.e. straight at the camera instead of facing the stage. This prologue is in the style of German Expressionism of the 1920s (Fritz Lang, Murnau). We then see the police evacuate the theater. A woman (played by Shu Qi) enters, carrying a camera, and takes a picture inside the hole. Intertitles inform us that a deliriant hides inside movies to continue dreaming. The woman is a trained technician capable of entering the subconscious of these dreamers and "healing" them of the desire to dream. We then see documentary black-and-white footage of the era played backwards. The woman back at home develops the picture and we see the face of a man. She realizes that he is hiding inside the opium den of a movie and enters that movie. She follows a woman down into a secret passage and enters the realm of the dreamer. We are still watching a silent movie, but now the colors are very strong, and the actress moves like a dancer in a classical ballet. After wandering in a magical world, she finally meets the dreamer, an ugly old hairless hunchback. She begs him to stop dreaming, as dreams are killing him, but he refuses. She nonetheless brings him back to the real world, to her house. She realizes that his hump contains a movie projector. She has mercy of him and loads the projector with the reels she has. Twenty minute into the film, we finally hear a sound: a female narrating voice informs us that this prolongs his life by 100 years.
Now there are no more intertitles, the screen becomes a wide screen and a movie within the movie begins. It is a noir espionage thriller set during wartime, in the 1940s. There is now spoken dialogue and sound. If the prologue corresponded to the sense of Sight, this segment corresponds to the sense of Hearing. Cops who behave like gangsters arrest a young man, Qiu, on a train, accusing him of murder. They find a sheet of music, the score for J.S. Bach s chorale Come, Sweet Death (BWV 478). The commander understands that that contains a coded message to find an important suitcase. The station master comes to negotiate the release of Qiu but the commander doesn't sell him. The cops torture Qiu: they hang him upside down from the ceiling and flog him. Qiu has murdered a musician and only remembers being in a house full of mirrors. Qiu claims he killed the musician because he went mad: the musician was fascinated by Qiu's voice and wanted to commit suicide on the railway tracks with Qiu but Qiu fought back. The musician self-mutilated his eardrums (not to hear Qiu's voice) with a fountain pen and was stabbed to death by Qiu. Qiu confesses that the musician had a heavy suitcase that he carried everywhere. The station master warns the commander that the suitcase drives people insane. Outside dozens of people are screaming to get a train ticket. Qiu leads the commander to the suitcase, which is kept in the house of mirrors. The commander pulls out a gun and orders him to open it. Inside there is only a theremin. Qiu hides behind the mirrors. The commander shoots but keeps hitting reflections. Qiu confesses that "Suitcase" is his code name as a secret agent. Qiu is the suitcase that the commander has been looking for. The commander keeps shooting with the only result of breaking mirrors. Qiu stabs the commander in one ear and escapes by train. The commander stabs himself in the other ear, so to become deaf, and then shoots one more mirror and jump inside a room where Qiu is asleep on the bed. The commander pulls out the theremin from the suitcase and performs the Bach piece. He then fights Qiu and stabs him, releasing a strong light.
Now we are back to Shu Qi, who feeds the dying deliriant another dream, which takes place twenty years later. Mongrel, a former monk, is guiding a group of robbers to an abandoned temple through a snowy landscape. As the robbers steal the statues, Mongrel stops in front of a new statue. He touches it and it crumbles. Mongrel is in pain due to a toothache. The robbers leave him behind because their truck is full of looted art. Mongrel is left alone in the snow-covered temple. Mongrel falls asleep and dreams that the Buddha statue tells him how to extract the tooth. A ghost appears who was trapped inside his tooth and introduces himself as the "Spirit of Bitterness", materialized as Mongrel's own father. The spirit is one step away from achieving enlightenment, but he has to discover the bitterest thing. It is snowing. The spirit writes "sweet" in the pond. During a lengthy dialogue between Mongrel and the Spirit of Bitterness we learn that Mongrel killed his father after the father got bitten by a dog and contracted rabies. The next morning, a lone dog leaves the temple.
Back to the narrating female voice, another dream starts, set ten years later. This one is about "smell". An "Old Man" offers a reward to anyone possessing supernatural powers. Two petty crooks split the banknotes (wrapped in a newspaper) that they stole from a man in a public bathroom. One of them is our deliriant, who has come to town for the reward. His name is now Jia. He neets an orphan girl who likes to ask riddles and senses an opportunity. He shows her that he can guess playing cards without seeing them. She is shocked but then realizes that a window behind them reflects the cards. He is a con artist. He trains her to help him with card tricks. In return, she asks that he helps her solve a riddle that noone ever solved: "What is it that once lost you can never get back?" She says that it is the most important thing for her: it was written on a banknote that her father left her before disappearing and she believes that, when she solves it, he will return to her. Jia and the girl manage to fool the Old Man into thinking that she can guess cards even when blindfolded by simply smelling them. She even recognizes a card that the Old Man burned to ashes. Not only the Old Man pays the reward, but also gets convinced that she has indeed supernatural smell powers. However, the girl is disappointed that Jia cannot solve the important riddle. That night Jia leaves the girl after splitting the money. One of the banknotes that he got from the Old Man has the riddle and also the solution: "a fart". It's just a nasty joke, and the girl thinks it's a supreme truth. Two thieves take Jia's money at knifepoint. He calmly smokes a cigarette while being robbed, but risks his life to keep the banknote with the riddle. The Old Man submits the girl to a lie detector. She passes the test even if she lied repeatedly. The Old Man (who is obviously a corrupt Communist Party boss) then confesses to her that his daughter hated him so much that she ran away from him and only took one object with her: his only surviving object of when he was fighting in the war, that she wanted to destroy so to erase any evidence that he had survived the war. Ten years later she died in a fire. The object, a little box, survived the fire and contained a burned letter. The Old Man wants the girl to smell it and tell him what was written in it. Now we know why he offered the reward to find someone with supernatural powers. The girl makes up words to please him.
Shu Qi s character introduces a new dream, which has to do with the sense of touch, set in a port city on New Year s Eve 1999 with people celebrating "the end of the world". A gang of motorcyclists hang someone from the ceiling. Apollo, a drunk young hoodlum chased by the "Raincoat Mob" meets a free-spirited young woman, Tai. He tells her that he is not afraid to die, nor is she. She tells him her only regret is not to have bitten anyone yet. Apollo tells her he has never kissed anyone. As he follows her through the red-light district (scenes captured with a very red filter a` la Wong Kar-wai), he asks her where she's going and she replies: "To die". He offers her to bite him. He mentions that a cargo boat should dock after sunrise. Tai cryptically tells a man we don't see that he promised to let her go at sunrise. He replies that it is not sunrise yet. She walks away and the camera follows her through the narrow alleys (all shot with a very red filter), which are initially deserted. Then suddenly a crowd starts following her as the rain increases. The mysterious man has been following her and everybody is scared of him: Luo. We don't see his face, we only hear his heavy breathing. She tgells him she wants to see sunrise. He tells her it's not worth it. He mentions that "the soil from your grave is in the karaoke bar" and she heads there. People are dancing to westernized electronic music. Meanwhile, outside, thugs dispose of a man whom Luo has killed. Luo enters the karaoke bar and is given a microphone. He starts singing while Apollo breaks into the place and is assaulted by Luo's thugs. Apollo tries to confront Luo, who keeps singing calmly his song, and the thugs beat and shoot Apollo. Tai is moved that Apollo would risk his life to protect her. Apollo, badly beaten, pulls out a gun and shoots Luo in a hand. Luo calmly lets the blood fill a glass. We understand that both Luo and Tia are vampires. Luo feeds Tia only with "cleansed" blood to make sure she doesn't turn into a human, which is a terrible destiny because humans are doomed to constantly searching for the meaning of life. The sun is coming up. Luo goes to sleep. Tai grabs the microphone and sings a sweet song to the morning light. The camera zooms on the window from which we can see people in the alley. Their movements are sped up in fast forward. Somehow Apollo survives. He and Tai run frantically through the deserted streets all the way to the dock and jump on the boat that has arrived. There is nobody on board. Tai is happy that he loves her but also desperate that she's a vampire. She confesses she died a long time ago. He doesn't care. It's almost dawn. He asks her to bite him. Tai bites him in the neck. They kiss and he dies, while the boat is drifting towards the open sea.
Shu Qi s character remarks that only two hours have passed for Tai, while a hundred years have passed for the deliriant. Shu Qi s character enters the deliriant's dream and steals Apollo's body. Back in her lab, she cleanses his body and put on his head the mask of the deliriant: an old dying monster. She then carries the corpse to a chamber that looks like a colombarium. She opens a portal and we see open sky. Now it feels like she is on a spaceship. She lets Apollo's corpse float out into the sky. She thinks she finally knows what the deliriant is attached to: cinema. She turns on a movie projector and bids farewell to the deliriant via a title card like the ones used in silent movies. The screen shrinks back to the smaller format of silent movies. We see a ruined building in the clouds. We see white silhouettes of light appear out of nowhere and enter the ruined building. It is a movie theater. The white lights/bodies take their seats and stare at the stage. The screen displays "The End" and the "spectators" disappear one by one melting on the floor. The whole buiding crumbles and melts. (Copyright © 2019 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )