At first blush, a French zombie comedy directed by the guy who won an Oscar for directing The Artist, in 2011, sounds like four cats fighting in a bag — a hard sell in the blockbuster-heat-stroke summer zone. But Michel Hazanavicius’s Final Cut (Coupez!, in French) is in fact more than that, as well as a little less. Nothing if not an earnest ironist who loves making movies about making movies (the last film of his we saw here was 2017’s very unserious Mon Amour Godard), Hazanavicius has come up with an inspiring trifle, paying smirking homage not to a cinema master but to the hacks and fools at the shallowest end of the film industry talent pool.
But it’s hardly an original auteur flourish, either — Final Cut is, in fact, a letter-by-letter remake of a Japanese film, Shin’ichirō Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead (2017), which detailed the ill-fated film shoot of a zombie thriller, to be shot and performed all in a single roving 30-minute shot and broadcast live on a virtual platform. That fictional featurette, the film within One Cut of the Dead, is also a film about shooting a zombie film, but one in which the actors turn into real zombies.
At first, you’re not sure what’s what: Both One Cut of the Dead and Final Cut work with a disarming play-rewind structure, with the first half-hour being the preposterously inept short film itself (titled Z by Hazanavicius, as in “zed,” nothing), full of mistakes and lameness. Then we jump back to before the deal arises, and then through preproduction and the shoot itself, experiencing its debacles from behind the camera. Weird pauses, visual ellipses, and irrelevant improv dialogue we don’t understand at first get their behind-the-scene explanations here.
The French film adds only the context of Z, being itself, like Final Cut, a remake of a Japanese original, which becomes both cute and hilarious as the unforgettably odd Japanese producer (Yoshiko Takehara) demands fidelity to the original, including the…
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