Not since Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho has a film felt as perfectly redundant as Michel Hazanavicius’s Final Cut. But if Van Sant’s reconstruction of Hitchcock’s masterpiece can be justifiably read as a radical formal experiment, Hazanavicius’s film, which transposes Ueda Shinichirô’s cult horror-comedy One Cut of the Dead from Japan to France and gains nothing in the process, is much harder to defend.
Ueda’s film is a cleverly constructed meta-comedy whose content is enhanced by its own scrappy origins. One Cut of the Dead is split into three roughly equal parts: a 30-plus-minute film-within-a-film shot in a single frenetic take, a flashback sequence focusing on the lives of the cast and crew in which we learn that the film-within-the-film was a troubled live televised event, and a final section revealing that the many clumsy moments and strange plot holes in the film-within-the-film were the result of a series of last-minute production disasters. Ueda is patient enough to allow minor continuity errors in the first part and seemingly banal character beats in the second to blossom into big, rich laughs in the final stretch.
Hazanavicius attempts to recapture lightning in a bottle by copying the original as closely as possible, only this time with two recognizable French stars, Bérénice Bejo and Romain Duris, in the lead roles. And like One Cut of the Dead, Final Cut is split into three parts, with all major plot points, comedic beats, and even many shots simply copied from the original.
Duris plays gun-for-hire commercial director Rémi, who promises his work will be “cheap, fast, and decent.” Rémi is recruited to helm a single-take film about the cast and crew of a zombie movie getting attacked by the real-life walking dead, which is set to be broadcast live on a new online streaming platform. But when a series of disasters strikes just before the camera is set to roll, Rémi and his wife, Nadia (Bejo), must step into lead acting roles, while their aspiring filmmaker daughter, Romy (Simone Hazanavicius), takes over the production.
One of the few significant alterations that Hazanavicius makes is that his film-within-a-film is, like Final Cut itself, a French remake of a Japanese original. Apt and amusing, the joke here is that the project’s producers, represented by a Japanese woman named Masuda (Yoshiko Takehara, who plays a similar role in One Cut of the Dead), are so adamant about adhering to the original script that even the Japanese character names and locations cannot be changed. Like Rémi, Hazanavicius here feels like a slave to a template that’s already been established.
Final Cut fundamentally misses what made One Cut of the Dead such an unexpected treat: the authenticity of its gleefully infectious let’s-put-on-a-show energy. Ueda, who produced the film for $25,000, was self-consciously making a low-budget zombie movie about making a low-budget zombie movie about making a low-budget zombie movie, and those concentric layers of metatextuality are key to the film’s appeal. It is, at heart, a film about itself. By pulling back the curtain on its own inventive homespun effects, it captures the joy of its own production.
However, Hazanavicius’s similar ode to low-budget resourcefulness often rings false. Once a purveyor of breezily likable retro kitsch, Hazanavicius has stumbled when attempting to tackle more ambitious projects since the success of The Artist vaulted him into the upper echelon of the French film industry. Perhaps Hazanavicius sees a bit of himself in Rémi, a journeyman director who, working in the constant grind of commercial filmmaking, has lost some of his artistic passion. But if Hazanavicius means to draw a parallel between Rémi and himself, the comparison isn’t especially flattering. While Rémi and his team come up with one necessity-mothered invention after another, apart from a couple novel gags like a tracking shot executed with a wheelchair, Hazanavicius here merely duplicates something that already exists.
Ultimately, Final Cut is a case of a well-connected French filmmaker with easy access to financing simply feigning at being a DIY renegade. The film ends, like Ueda’s, with a climactic crane shot, pulled off by the entire crew standing on each other’s shoulders, lifting the camera up to the top of their human pyramid. Hazanavicius sets this feel-good moment of improvised ingenuity to Electric Light Orchestra’s sweeping, immaculately produced—and, one imagines, expensive to license—hit “Livin’ Thing.” It’s difficult to think of a better song to encapsulate how hollow the film’s celebration of micro-budget creativity really is. For filmmakers like Hazanavicius, inspiration can always be bought secondhand.
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