If Footsteps is still remaking a newer movie, it’s better to make it your own, even if it’s not much better. French Zoomcom Final Cut is neither. Veteran filmmaker Michelle Hazanavicius (“The Artist”) may win an Oscar, but his uncouth riff in the Japanese movie “One Cut of the Dead” (2019) I haven’t received any ratings. The original ultra-low-budget charm.
In “One Cut of the Dead,” crew members shooting a B-level zombie movie are attacked by the undead in a shaky one-take sequence. the work Despite the inexplicable silence and the blatantly bogus amputated limbs. We immerse ourselves in the making of a movie within a movie and follow the shoot from a chaotic, behind-the-scenes perspective. While the first half is fun, the second half is golden, mining absurd humor, breathless tension, and the film’s magical triumph from the onslaught of small crises.
Hazanavicius’ adaptation is an almost perfect copy. An axe-wielding makeup actress (Berenice Bejo) plays her artist and comes out in a terrifying way. A blood-splattered “last girl” (Matilda Lutz) who cuts off the head of her lover (Finnegan Oldfield). Thanks to a drunken, vomit-spitting castmate, and another player being hit with explosive diarrhea, some of the real-world effects were all too real.
Hazanavicius’ French translation has had several tweaks, the most interesting of which is to add more metacinema layers to the plot. “One cut” also exists in this world, and a Japanese group representing the rights holders of the movie is closing in on the director, Remi (Romain Duris). The cross-pollination of Japanese and French cultures has a long and fascinating history, and although the two countries are home to one of the oldest and most robust film industries in the world, Hazanavicius is only superficially involved in the globalization of filmmaking. It’s working, mostly through a culture of laziness. Collision ridicule: Pearl Harbor jokes here, jabs on the typically poor French work ethic there.
“Final Cut” puts elements of its predecessor through an Instagram blatant filter. This deliberate omission of filming, which is truly kitsch in the original, sounds like a lie as Hazanavicius details the staff’s failures in a way that flattens the humor and kills the momentum.
In France, making a film about the making of a film is virtually a rite of passage (François Truffaut’s Day for Night, Mia Hansen-Love’s Bergman Island, or Olivier Assayas (see Irma Vep). Incorporating metafictional bounties and playful genres, ‘One Cut’ offers a pretentiousness ripe for anyone to choose from. But what Hazanavicius did here is a lifeless mockup, a rehash made purely for viewers who don’t want to read Japanese subtitles. At least that would be some kind of justification for its existence.
final cut
Unrated. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. at the theater.
