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, which is 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 French cast using the Japanese character names.
Spurting gore is simply an off-screen PA spitting through a tube.
It might sound complex, but metatextuality is not Hazanavicius’s jam — the film is only about things going wrong, and it’s never less than bouncy and actor-driven. As the Ed Wood–ish non-auteur at the center of this, Romain Duris’s Rémi is a game and unscrupulous scallywag, modestly trying and failing over and over again to maintain control of the collapsing production machine as it succumbs to cast disappearances, drunken stupors, diarrhea, technical mishaps, and so on. Just as in Ueda’s original, Remi has a devoted ex-actress wife (Berenice Bejo, Mrs. Hazanavicius) and an alienated pulp-fan daughter (Simone Hazanavicius), both of whom get dubiously involved in the making of Z. In fact, the misfiring father-daughter relationship is part of why Remi takes the impossible job to begin with, but as you’d guess, the film’s attempts at anchored familial drama are piddling and easily overrun with Murphy’s Law disasters and zom-com hijinks.
Strangely, given the nesting-doll context, Final Cut is a very simple film, concerned mostly with delivering the comic stress inherent to the DIY basics of low-budget filmmaking: the Rube Goldberg solutions; the suffering of actor-y volatility (Finnegan Oldfield is masterly as a pretentious young star swathed in blue zombie makeup); the junkbox F/X (spurting gore is simply an offscreen PA spitting through a tube), etc. Knowing, as everyone in the film does, including Remi, that Z is doomed to be dreadful frees Final Cut from gravitas, letting it focus merely on the frantic ticking-clock rule of film shoots: Get the shot, by any means necessary.
It’s never much more than that. A love letter to crap-making, Hazanavicius’s film reserves its modest beating heart for the strange and exultant camaraderie crew members feel on the set of even the crummiest project, a forged-by-fire feeling that can mystify non-crew. Unlike like-minded (and real-life-inspired) movies such as Ed Wood and The Disaster Artist, Final Cut doesn’t sentimentalize the ambition of a single crazy anti-auteur — it’s about everybody, just getting it done. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
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