Review | Cannes 2024: An Unfinished Film review – Chinese director Lou Ye’s chaotic yet powerful drama about Covid lockdown in Wuhan
- An Unfinished Film should find plenty of traction from mainland Chinese audiences eager to see their own painful experiences wrought large on screen
- Director Lou Ye delivers both a powerful rebuke of excessive state intervention into private lives, and a celebratory ode to the resilience of the masses
4/5 stars
What would have been fatal flaws in other movies, however, turn out to be the strongest parts of mainland Chinese director Lou Ye’s latest production.
Premiering out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, An Unfinished Film is a mind-boggling mix of melodrama and real-life videos, in which moments of sadness and ennui are followed by eruptions of joy and manic energy.
While foreign viewers might struggle to follow the on-screen depiction of those lost Covid years, An Unfinished Film – which was filmed in China but presented in Cannes as a Singaporean-German co-production – should find plenty of traction from mainland audiences eager to see their own painful experiences wrought large on screen.
An Unfinished Film begins in July 2019, when filmmaker Xiaorui (played by Mao Xiaorui) recovers footage from a long-aborted, low-budget project about a gay man’s tangled relationship with his wife and his lover (drawn from Lou Ye’s award-winning Spring Fever from 2009).
He calls up his then leading man Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao, the real-life star in Spring Fever) and manages to convince the now A-list actor to help him shoot additional scenes to complete the film.
Fast-forward to January 2020 and Xiaorui, with his cast and crew – Lou Ye’s real-life collaborators, who play themselves – converge at a hotel in Wuhan and try to wrap up production before the Lunar New Year holiday.
As news filters in about the authorities’ decision to block people from leaving the city, the hotel descends into mayhem. Running battles between panic-stricken crew members and hazmat-wearing health workers ensue, just as individuals begin to fall ill and collapse.
Zeng Jian’s handheld camerawork does wonders in chronicling the confusion and commotion within the maze of narrow corridors and packed rooms.
But the versatile cinematographer is equally successful in depicting the gloom and doom as suffered by the sequestered characters, their only relief arriving through online group meetings, their self-made short videos and their occasional – and brutally suppressed – breakouts from their quarantine.
Interweaving the characters’ trajectory with real-life videos drawn from mainland Chinese social media, An Unfinished Film actually goes beyond its Covid roots and offers a glimpse of how people navigate, accommodate and rebel against restrictions they consider too draconian.
On that level, Lou – who was twice banned from filmmaking for screening his movies at festivals abroad without official approval – has delivered both a powerful rebuke against excessive state intervention into private lives, and a celebratory ode to the resilience of the masses.
