Cannes Diary #1: The festival opens with zombies... again
Wednesday, May 18, 2022 at 11:13AM Elisa Giudici reporting again from Cannes!
Cannes is back again trying to rewrite its new normal. After the skipped 2020 edition and the anomalous summery one in 2021, the 75th Cannes Film Festival is has kicked off with the Croisette in full blossom. Masks are almost gone in theatres (even if before every movie a recorded voice “strongly suggests” to wear one), Marché du film (the huge Film Market's event in Cannes) has ended a period of crisis and low presence. COVID-19 changed the French festival and some changes are here to stay...
One of those: the ticketing system. There's no more legendary queues, wherein you risk not even seeing the movie after hours waiting in line. That's definitively a piece of good news for press with lower ranked passes. Or at least it would be if the dedicated website hadn't crashed yesterday. Truth be told, everything was smooth today and the issue seems fixed. Every day at 7:00 AM you book tickets for events and movies four days from then. So stay tuned to discover which films I booked yesterday for... May 20th, solely because those were the ones available when the website started functioning again.
Romain Duris stars in "Coupez!" (Final Cut)
COUPEZ! (Final Cut) by Michel Hazanavicius
Do you remember Jim Jarmusch’s zombie movie The Dead Don't Die? It opened Cannes in 2019. In 2022 another zombie film is chosen to open the kermesse: a French one. Michel Hazanavicius’ Final Cut is the remake of the Japanese low-budget zombie cult One Cut of the Dead by Shin’ichirô Ueda. There is a consensus that the original is the better film. Still, I find Hazanavicius’ take on zombies a stronger opening film than Jarmusch's three years back.
You have to endure an (intentionally) poorly made 30 minute intro before starting to understand and laugh (with relief?) at this zombie comedy. Every continuity mistake, every badly acted line, every strange scene in which actors act like they are desperately trying to buy time will find an explanation, often a funny one. The main theme of the movie is the art of making cinema itself. Not the great art-house titles, but the 'low art', quickly mad, and cheaply produced projects. They're what the director of the movie within this movie (played by Roman Duris) made a career of. His motto is "fast, cheap, and decent". Final Cut is light and funny, but built with care; I think it is closer to good than decent.
One of the most intriguing aspects of this French adaptation is how much of it is still recognizablely the peculiar Japanese humor of the original. Hazanavicius creates a complex explanation even to keep the Japanese names of the original protagonists. I wasn't entirely convinced by it, but in this particular case, the distance between the Japanese sense of humor and the French way of doing comedy adds a further layer of surrealism to the bizarre meta-film protagonists are working on.
Final Cut © Getaway Films
more tomorrow!
Cannes, Final Cut, Michel Hazanavicius, Romain Duris, film festivals
Reader Comments (2)
I have to say that I dont really understand Hazanavicius' career. I like THE ARTIST a lot and think the online hate for it is dumb. But why remake *this*?
One Cut of the Dead is a little marvel... a pity that they have remade it, but intrigued about the french take.