QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM CANNES

The capacity to lie is one of the mains gauges of cinema. In other words, a movie’s ability to confound viewers is considered a strength. A documentary that feels so absurd and unreal it’s almost impossible to believe is generally perceived as a good documentary. Conversely, a fiction film that looks very real tends to receive praise for tricking viewers. And then there’s everything else in between: docufiction, autofiction, mockumentary, etc. These are moves films that set out not to reveal what is and what isn’t true, leaving viewers deliciously lost and perplexed. An Unfinished Film seems to belong to such category.

Director Ye Lou follows a film cast and crew as they reunite after 10 years in order to finish a movie that was never completed, and it’s never entirely clear how much is true and how much is made-up. Lou takes the fly-on-the-wall approach, staying firmly behind the camera. It follows filmmaker Xiaorui (played by himself) as he unearths takes from one old film of his, and thus decides.to contact the actors involved in order to resume the work. The story of the film-within-the-film surrounds the intimate moments of a young and loving gay couple (played by Qin Hao and Huang Xuan). The problem is that one of the actors is now married to a woman, who is expecting their first child. Presumably, its is his internalised homophobia that prevents the man from giving his gay character a new lease of life (even if this is never verbalised). There are also concerns that the movie may never pass the country’s strict censorship. The story is allegedly inspired by Ye’s own discovery of his unused materials.

This is not Eduardo Coutinho’s 20 Years Later (1984), a seminal documentary from Brazil about a film put on pause for two decades due to political censorship (a coup d’etat in 1964 resulted in a very long dictatorship), and which became a completely different beast upon being rekindled. Instead, A Unfinished Film is a part-fiction, part-documentary story of a helmer who had to put his creation in the back burner twice for very different reasons. They seemingly pulled the plug on Xiaorui for financial reasons the first time, and then for a combination of personal, and health and safety (Covid-19) in the second stance. The made-up elements of An Unfinished Film are so conspicuous that this may could be billed as plain fiction (even if that isn’t the case).

The final 15 minutes of this 105-minute film are the most moving ones. The topic of filmmaking becomes entirely secondary, and the focus shifts towards the successive lockdowns and variants of Covid that afflicted Wuhan (the focus is solely on the Chinese city, where the virus first appeared, and not the pandemic consequences for the globe). Videoconferencing footage of the cast, crew and others laughing as they meet remotely is mixed with cheesy Chinese pop music to heartwarming results. Mobile footage captured by an ecstatic woman as she was allowed to leave her house for the first time after a super-strict two-month quarantine is both jarring and sobering: she sobs uncontrollably as she sees the streets for the first time.

The problem with many docufiction movies is that the creators become so concerned with experimenting with language and confound viewers, that the actual story becomes confusing and difficult to follow. They sacrifice coherence for the sake for metalanguage. That too is the case with An Unfinished Film, an inventive little movie with some powerful moments, however dogged by the lack of intelligibility. Ye insistently seeks to craft a documentary feel in a story that’s almost entirely scripted. He inserts a high dose of casualness, a variety of textures and media (“real” interactions, found footage, phone videos, Zoom calls, etc), and other devices associated with traditional documentary practice into his film. But the outcome is often messy.

After the golden age of documentary in the early 21th century, when docs such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 (2004) and Luc Jacquet’s March of the Penguins (2005) reached the mainstream and made an astronomic amount of money, I would hazard a guess that we are about the enter the golden age of docufition. The profusion of such films suggests that they are here to stay. In just three days, I came across three such flicks in Cannes, the other two being Quentin Dupieus’s The Second Act and Hernán Rosselli’s Something Old Something New Something Borrowed. None of these films have achieved the same heights as metalinguistic masterpieces Hello Cinems (Mohsen Makmalbadf, 1996) and Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2023). Filmmakers must understand that it is possible to challenge the formal orthodoxies of film without compromising the storyline.

Despite being entirely set in China, this is billed as German-Singaporean production, presumably due to the country’s strict censorship.

An Unfinished Film just premiered at the 77th Festival de Cannes, as part of the Special Screenings section.