On the evening of May 22, local time, the only Chinese-language film in the main competition unit of the 78th Cannes Film Festival, "Wild Times", completed its world premiere in the Lumiere Hall. Director Bi Gan and starring Chinese actors such as Yi Yangqianxi, Shu Qi, Huang Jue, and Zhao Youting stepped onto the red carpet, and the 2,309-seat theater of the Cannes Film Palace was packed.
Wild Times Red Carpet
The film deconstructs the spiritual world in six chapters, from the black-and-white silent film aesthetics of the 1900s to the cyber ruins of the near future. Bi Gan uses "vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch and thinking" to build a sensory museum. In the first chapter, the neurosurgeon played by Shu Qi falls into the abyss of consciousness during surgery and finds the remains of a bionic man; the bionic man played by Yi Yang Qianxi travels through different time and space in five rebirths, and each identity carries the director's archaeology and prophecy of the film medium.
Bi Gan talked about his hope to reawaken the ritual of movies when he was interviewed by Variety magazine in Cannes. "The screen is getting smaller and smaller. I want to evoke the old feeling of watching movies in the theater."
Poster of Wild Times
The 24-year-old Yi Yang Qianxi once again completed a breakthrough performance in the movie, playing five roles. He needed to use a nearly pantomime performance to present the awakening and transformation of the bionic man's consciousness; in different stories, his appearance, age, body shape, and voice are also different.
Director Bi Gan, who is good at discovering the unique aspects of actors, also talked about the cooperation with the two actors in the interview, "Shu Qi has a strong ability to go with the flow and express herself. When I talk to her, I might say, 'This scene is like dancing,' and she can understand my ideas without explanation - her intuition is very sharp."
Yi Yang Qianxi plays five roles in the film
For Yi Yang Qianxi, a young star who is "full of energy and spirit", Bi Ganhui takes a more concrete approach. "I will talk to him about feelings and the movie and be more specific about how things will develop. I will tell him my ideas, and he will write them down and then perform them."
From the 42-minute long shot in "Picnic at Hanging Rock" to the 3D dream in "The Last Night on Earth", Bi Gan is good at exploring new boundaries of film narrative with vivid film expressions and even some "radical" forms. This new film once again demonstrates his ability to control long shots. According to feedback from the audience, the film contains a 30-minute long shot, and the fusion of iconic film languages from different eras also really makes movie fans ecstatic.
"Wild Times" was included in the list of the main competition unit on the eve of the official opening of Cannes. The unique tribute to film art and the ultimate personal expression received a warm response in Cannes. After the film was screened in the Lumière Hall, the audience stood up and applauded. According to feedback from the audience and the media on social media, the applause lasted for ten minutes. Bi Gan thanked the Cannes Film Festival for choosing this film and thanked everyone for coming and spending more than two hours watching this film together. Some comments said that the film is very Bi Gan. If you are not a fan of his, it may still be unbearable and incomprehensible like watching "Picnic at the End of the Road" and "The Last Night on Earth", but people who like his image style will be fascinated.
