Ever since Michel Hazanavicius’ Oscar-winning tribute to silent cinema “The Artist,” the French filmmaker has continued to focus his work on the process of filmmaking itself, for better and, mostly, for worse. After “Redoutable,” centered on the relationship between Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Wiazemsky during the filming of “La Chinoise,” he again explored la magie du cinéma in “The Lost Prince,” where Omar Sy (the biggest star on French Netflix and, maybe, in French cinema tout court) saw the rich fantasy film-set world he had created for his daughter begin to crumble as she started to outgrow his fairytales. On closer look, however, this apparent interest in filmmaking and creation almost seems to be a cover for a much more banal and less admirable impulse than the love of cinema — namely, the desire for mass recognition mixed with a broad sense of intellectual credibility. In other words, Oscars.
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It follows that all the films mentioned above show a clear debt to — and a hankering for — American cinema, though perhaps none more than “The Lost Prince.” With its extreme reliance on special effects, cheaply sentimental perspective, and an imaginary world looking like a Disneyland theme park, the film comes across as some kind of weird “Inside Out” remake, stuck between an Americanised, pat idea of what imagination and childhood are like, and an indelible French sensibility (that last element is what made Hazanavicius’ “OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies” actually good).
In “Final Cut,” the director’s remake of the Japanese success story “One Cut of the Dead,” his eagerness to please and casual contempt for anything with less than a broad appeal jump out, if you will. Like Shin’ichirō Ueda’s original, Hazanavicius’ film begins with about 30 minutes of a mediocre and oddly paced one-take zombie film, in which a crew making a zombie film is attacked by real zombies. After this section ends, we are brought some weeks back to explore the backstory of how this rather poor, meta, one-take and, it turns out, live horror film came to be, and the film concludes with a replay of the one-take film this time is seen from the perspective of the out-of-frame crew, adapting as best they can to a series of farcical unexpected challenges as they record. Extremely lo-fi and with a cast of unknowns, “One Cut of the Dead” was about a karaoke video-maker given a chance to create something more challenging, and making an actual effort to deliver something good for the first time in a long time. That his zombie film ended up being only average despite all his work, and despite the way in which the divided cast and crew ultimately came together to help him cross the finish line, was perhaps an unexpected counter to classical narratives of how effort and belief in oneself are enough to overcome all obstacles. But it also was of relatively little importance, since it was obvious that anyone would struggle to make a good film with such small means. Rather than acerbic or bitter, this failure was simply an effect of the stark realism of “One Cut of the Dead”; a foregone conclusion. Instead of focusing on whether the film being made would be any good at all, the attention was on the comedy of the characters’ dynamics.
It was a smart balance of tones, between the genuinely heartwarming and the broader comedy of errors. In “Final Cut,” the realism that grounded the humor of the original film turns into outright cynicism because this time, the cast and crew have absolutely no excuses for making a crap movie. It is very hard to sympathize and celebrate with the director Rémi (Romain Duris) since, unlike his Japanese counterpart, he has a much more significant budget at his disposal and has made actual film work before, even if mostly for TV. The true underdog from the Japanese film, therefore, becomes a character that we are supposed to believe is under comparable pressure but simply isn’t. The film’s lazy, anti-intellectual and reactionary perspective is felt in the severe lack of laughs, extending way beyond the purposefully bad single-take opening, but also in its idiotic jokes about racism and women breastfeeding (the French touch). Most painfully, however, it is displayed in the comedy it tries to draw from passionate lead actor Raphaël (Finnegan Oldfield), the only person on set actually concerned with making actual art. When, after being forced to step into the role of the director-character within the zombie movie he is making, Rémi takes this opportunity to for-real slap Raphaël and take revenge on him for all the criticisms he had of the script, the gesture isn’t funny. To imply that it would be unreasonable for an actor of that caliber and on a film of that size to try and do good work is just depressing, and when Raphaël complains that “we have to respect the audience,” he does not sound like he is making a mountain out of a molehill.
The only person to come across as arrogant here is Hazanavicius himself, who apparently does not realize how lazy “Final Cut” is and how condescending to its audience. Costing several million and starring famous actors, his version betrays the clubby sensibility and persecutory delusion of someone so entrenched in the world of commercial French cinema that they think the existence of mediocre mid-budget films is funny, and that we should have some sympathy for the people who worked really hard to make them. It’s really hard to do that, though, when one of them opens the Cannes Film Festival. [D]
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