A review of "Final Cut" a sly zombie comedy from the author of the Oscar-winning "The Artist".
A remake of the Japanese "Zombies in One Plan!" with a French twist
Somewhere in an abandoned building near Paris, a film crew tries to shoot a zombie horror. Nothing comes out: the lead actress (Mathilde Anne Ingrid Luts) can't get out the right emotion, and the director (Romain Durys) blatantly abuses his subjects. To make the film come out more "alive", the director eventually decides to awaken the real dead. The actors don't have to pretend: the battle with the zombies becomes quite real.
"Final Cut" is a deceptive film. The less you know about the tricky narrative structure, the better the movie is perceived. But still it is impossible to describe the picture without revealing all the cards, so get ready for spoilers. The story that is described above in the synopsis actually only takes up half an hour of running time. The dead men are defeated, the camera pulls back epically - and suddenly the "Cut!" command sounds, and the viewer is transported to a month earlier. This whole half-hour zombie horror, shot in one shot, turns out to be a movie within a movie. The real story of "Homicide Montage" is a comedy about a mediocre director who is entrusted with a difficult task: to make that one-frame zombie horror. And it will also be broadcast online. That is, the hero has only one attempt to do everything right.
The structure of the film is unusual if only because it requires a certain patience on the part of the viewer. The fact is that the half-hour movie at the beginning is, to put it mildly, bad. It has a lot of pointless drawn-out scenes and is awkwardly shot and acted. But here's the joke: it's the way it's supposed to be! The rest of the hour of the picture just explains why the zombie horror turned out to be so ridiculous, giving new context, making you look at the events with different eyes. The drawn-out scene arose because the characters had to pump out a drunken actor who missed an appearance. The awkward shooting is because the cameraman, with a bad back, fell and couldn't get up. "Homicidal editing" finds a hilarious justification for every mistake.
Of course, it is strange to praise Michel Hazanavicius' film for its unusual narrative. After all, "Final Cut" is a remake of the Japanese comedy "Zombies in One Plan!" And it is so accurate that there is even a joke about it inside the film. The main character's director is forbidden to change anything in the original Japanese script. Therefore, the French actors call each other names like Hosoda and Natsumi, and the appearance of the dead men is explained by the secret experiments of the Japanese army. That is, if the original made fun of the conventions of filmmaking in the first place, Hazanavicius's picture also pokes fun at the phenomenon of deadpan remakes.
But this is perhaps the only new gag in the film. Otherwise, it repeats the source material almost frame by frame. And if you're familiar with "Zombies in One Plan!", of course, the French remake is hardly surprising. Still, a joke, repeated twice, rarely comes out funny. In a way, it even helps that Slaughterhouse Montage is funny. Since the shocking concept does not overpower, there is more time for drama within the picture. Both "Final Cut" and "Zombies in One Plan!" - are not primarily films about filmmaking, and certainly not uplifting stories of victory in spite of it all. But gentle tragicomedies about losers making little loser movies.
Hazanavicius even emphasizes this idea with deft stylization - or rather, with a deft absence of any stylization. Previously, he copied the aesthetics of silent films in The Artist or parodied new wave directors in Young Godard. Here, the director makes just a film, without any distinctive artistic features. In the Japanese version, the creative drabness was not read as a deliberate move - after all, the author Shinichiro Ueda simply did not have time to prove himself as a skilled visionary. But in the case of Hazanavichus, this is obviously a cunning trick. He could certainly make a beautiful stylish movie. But he didn't.
For a film about the fact that even stubborn mediocrities are worthy of creative happiness, there is no need for flashy aesthetics. This is also why the French remake's sweet ode to "ordinaryness" becomes even more obvious. If the protagonist of the Japanese film could at least justify himself with the originality of the idea, the protagonist of "Homicide Montage" initially makes the most passable movie: a secondary b-movie, needed only to fill the catalog of the opening streaming service. And that makes his feat all the more impressive. As hard as he can, solving a million things on the fly, he makes a poorly made zombie horror movie that absolutely nobody wants. "Homicide Editing" is far from the best, but one of the most lucid films about the power and magic of cinema. We see how out of chaos is born, not a great work or even a stunningly awful one, as in "Ed Wood." It's just a movie. Ordinary, unassuming, utterly mediocre. And it is still infinitely beautiful.
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