J Paul Johnson
There’s a clever irony in a film’s being titled, as is Chinese director Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film, when it’s indeed finished and, as it has, premiered already at Cannes. Coming to the North American market courtesy of Film Movement, An Unfinished Film is not only finished, it’s powerful and thought-provoking, a hybrid-form docudrama mixing extant footage with re-enacted content to create a work that disrupts the boundaries between fact and fiction—and, in the process, making for a taut lockdown thriller.
While An Unfinished Film may be finished, its plot concerns a not-yet finished film. Set first in late 2019, some months before the Coronavirus pandemic would wash quickly over China and then the world, director Xiaorui (Mao Xiaorui, standing in for Ye) finds footage lost from a decade ago. He had, then, been making a film with his two lead actors (played by Huang Xuan and Qin Hao), yet abandoned it when he and his financiers did not see eye to eye. Sticking firmly to his principles, the director refused to finish the film rather than yield to his financier’s suggestions.
Xiaorui and his team locate the hard drives containing the old footage and are delighted to find it not only intact, but promising. And now, given his greater success and standing, Xiaorui has the method and the means both to finish his previously-unfinished film, and he is able not only to tweak the plot to account for its ten-year ellipsis but to persuade his crew and cast to return to the task. It’s not easy—and most of them now have familial and other obligations to consider, one of them with an uneasy wife and young child he must leave at home.
This first act of An Unfinished Film feels entirely documentary in nature. Save for the fact that we are watching another man in the role of Lou Ye, the footage has an ad hoc, extemporaneous, even verité feel, as if the audience were a fly on the wall watching the discovery of found footage and subsequent decision-making unfold. The tight editing and quick pace keep the narrative on the move, and the film crew makes quick progress with their reboot of the previously unfinished film they’re set back to work on.
And then, the all-too-familiar signals herald what’s to come. A crew member coughs, and later, passes out. Another, set to arrive from Wuhan, is forbidden entry to the hotel where shooting is taking place. Within minutes, an outright panic of rules, rumors, accusations, and confusion halts the shoot. Some crew members flee the hotel before it’s quarantined; others, hoping to, are subject to house arrest. Xiaorui, Xuan, Hao, and his primary crew are confined to their hotel rooms with the director’s instructions to film and save everything for future use; there, they confide their fears to their loved ones, commiserate and even party over Zoom calls, and contemplate their bleak futures in a world suddenly plagued with a near-unprecedented pandemic.
These scenes—especially those taking place as the virus reaches the hotel and cast and crew begin to panic—are shot and edited with the precision of a taut suspense thriller. They also, for whatever its worth, reveal the film’s guise, that it is not at all documentary in nature but instead carefully, methodically scripted and acted, even if what happens in An Unfinished Film is, by Ye’s account, largely faithful to his own experience as Covid first spread in early 2020: no camera operator would or could have been allowed to shoot what the audience sees onscreen, yet this section of the film flies by so quickly even a close viewer could be forgiven for not noticing.
As it hurtles towards its somber conclusion, An Unfinished Film incorporates footage from coverage of the 2020 lockdowns imposed on China’s residents and the high human cost of the virus’ death toll. It makes for a sobering reminder of what the Chinese in particular suffered, generally. And, like nearly every other filmmaker, Ye’s work was disrupted and upended by the sudden spread of the pandemic. It cost thousands their jobs, their projects, their livelihoods. Some managed to carry on, under strict and unprecedented protocols. Others had to suspend or even abandon their projects: I’m sure there are untold numbers of “unfinished films” floating about on hard drives like those one sees at the beginning of An Unfinished Film.
Fortunately, Lou Ye has made from his experience a film that dramatizes and commemorates the pandemic with intelligence, grace, and even suspense. Like, say, Bertrand Bonello’s Coma, Zach Clark’s The Becomers, or Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan’s New Strains, the pandemic can be not only an obstacle but a means to make thoughtful, contemplative, meaningful film art. Many a film may remain forever unfinished, but fortunately, An Unfinished Film is not one of them.
