Director: Michel Hazanavicious
Writers: Michel Hazanavicious, Shin’ichirô Ueda, and Ryoichi Wada
Stars: Romain Duris, Bérénice Bejo, Grégory Gadebois
Synopsis: Things go badly for a small film crew shooting a low budget zombie movie when they are attacked by real zombies.
Last year’s Cannes Film Festival opened with a surprising film that many didn’t expect to play there – Michel Hazanavicious’ Final Cut (Coupez!), a French-language remake of the future horror cult hit, One Cut of the Dead. Festival-goers were baffled and confused at the decision that this would be the curtain raiser for one of the most prestigious cinematic events. It wasn’t beloved as some people thought it would be, yet it is slowly finding its audience. Now, the film is finally making its way onto the U.S. festival market by screening at the Tribeca Film Festival – releasing in select theaters in July. Was it worth the wait? Both yes and no, depending on how you look at it. While the film is too identical to separate itself from the original, Hazanavicius delivers enough funny self-referential quips and purposeful schlocky B-horror aesthetics to make the journey into an entertaining, yet rocky, ride.
The film begins with a terribly made (and schlock-full) scene where a woman, Ava (Matilda Lutz), is being bitten by her now zombie boyfriend, Raphael (Finnegan Oldfield). No emotion or terror is running through the actors’ faces on-screen, which upsetsthe director, Remi (Romain Duris), a lot. This is supposed to be the last scene in the film, and he’s asking for another take – a thirty-second one, to be more specific – because the whole project will fall apart if it doesn’t work. Ava is trying to plead her case that she was portraying the scene correctly, but Remi begs to differ. As his frustrations grow, he has a rampage-heavy outburst where he slaps and insults some of the cast and crew right until Nadia (Bérénice Bejo) calms him down a bit. They banter about the director’s usual violent antics, as all of them are tired of his attitude.
After a couple of minutes, a series of rather unfortunate events transpire. The crew appears to be turning into zombies, looking similar to those of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, with painted blue faces. Ava, Raphael, and Nadia try to run away and fight the zombies in their path. But, as seen in those types of movies, things descend into bloody hell quickly. Ava gets the title of ‘final girl’ as she is the only survivor of this massacre. Something interesting happens next; credits sequences appear on-screen, mocking the audience by presenting an array of metatextual layers – matryoshka doll, a film within a film within yet another film, all of which collide with one another to form an easy-flowing (albeit rocky) and funny ode to what it means to be a director.
Final Cut shows a dual-sided story. The first, and central, storycenters around the ups and downs of the filmmaking process via the perspective of a frustrated French auteur that desperately wants to make his project work, even though it is falling apart completely. In this segment, the audience sees how a director and the producers pitch the project to the studio and its backers, how the crew tries to get a hold of the shoot’s troubling situations, and managing actors. We even see the first thirty minutes from another angle, via Remi’s perspective, as he pursues the double role of being in front of and behind the camera. It’s Michel Hazanavicius presenting a love letter to filmmaking and the pursuit of one’s vision. You feel his passion for the craft; how he directs these sequences of directorial struggles feels like it comes from first-hand experience.
The second one is the movie Remi and his crew are making – a terribly made zombie flick. Here, we see plenty of homages to both genre and B-horror pictures from the 70s and 80s. The practicality of the effects and makeup, as we know how all of them were made by this point in the movie, is the crucial aspect of this segment. You see moments where Hazanavicius wants to channel his inner Romero, Fulci, or Bava. He doesn’t come close to having the mastery and refinery these aforementioned directors had. But, it is a different side of him that we haven’t seen before, partaking in a new genre to explore his love for the ins and outs of the cinematic experience. And although it has some technical downsides in terms of structure, it works more than one would expect.
This isn’t the first time that he has done a remake, as Hazanavicius has directed a James Bond parody with OSS 117 and a haphazard Jean-Luc Godard biopic, Godard Mon Amour, in which he recreates scenes of La Chinoise. So, it makes sort of sense that he’d continue to make his versions of other established stories. There aren’t many highly notable changes between Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead and Hazanavicius’ Final Cut. But the latter suffers a bit from the “why is this being made” remake issues, as it doesn’t add much to what was established in the original, even though you are enjoying what you are seeing. During the middle section, we get a handful of scenes where characters talk about what Hazanavicius is doing, remaking a foreign language picture. These conversations are a fifty-fifty balance of funny and annoying because of its self-referential nature. Yet, it lets us know why the French filmmaker did this project.
Their discussions are somewhat witty and make you think about what the pitch meetings for the vast vacuous remakes that have appeared throughout the years would be like. However, the more it explains itself to the audience, the more the movie loses steam. This issue arrives because Hazanavicius packs his remake with twenty more minutes than the original. He extends the runtime to expand on the self-referential idea of doing an unnecessary remake. Extremely heavy-handed remarks are present and hurt Final Cut’s latter half. For those who haven’t experienced One Cut of the Dead, Final Cut will feel like a fresh and bold horror-comedy venture. If you have seen both, you immediately recognize that Hazanavicius’ vision is more poe-face and charmless than the 2017 movie. Of course, this one would be inferior to the original, as the magic it conjured back when it was released felt special and unique.
Replicating that feeling is a challenging task to do. Michel Hazanavicious tries his best and slightly succeeds in specific points. But Final Cut (Coupez!) is too identical to separate itself from it. At least you laugh and get showered in crimson red along the way.
