Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film opens with a scene in a place both easily familiar and entirely alien – a nondescript studio office in China, shot through documentary-style handheld digital cameras, unremarkable but for the fact that it’s November 2019, just before COVID. Cinema has been unwilling to work through this terrifying-yet-dull interruption to the lives of everyone on the planet but An Unfinished Film, opening with its characters making their plans for early 2020 and the Chinese New Year that would become day one of the Chinese lockdown, makes it clear from the jump that this is 100% a ‘COVID film’. It’s a bold and brave choice that pays off in spades, reliving the tensions, panics, malaises, and brief joys of pandemic living in a deeply moving way.
Blurring the lines between reality and fiction (a lot of crew members end up playing themselves as the crew of the movie-within-the-movie), An Unfinished Film follows the cast and crew of an indie movie that shot back in 2009 but was never finished, funds falling through before an ending could be shot. Suddenly inspired by the old footage, director Xiaorui (Xiaorui Mao) makes a call to his former leading man Jiang Cheng (Hao Qin) – whose career success has largely moved him out of the indie space in the intervening years – to shoot a ‘ten-years-later’ ending for their film.
Jiang agrees but, inevitably, the January 2020 shoot is interrupted by the lockdown, trapping most of the crew in their hotel indefinitely, with Jiang the most broken by this – he has a wife and newborn baby back home. In covering November 2019 to Spring 2020, Ye is able to shift genres through the months; all the pre-COVID stuff is gently uneventful and lightly funny on the surface, but naturally shot through with impending dread, while the day of the lockdown itself is almost an apocalypse movie, mad fear and uncertainty ruling the day.
It’s effectively jarring stuff, which will dredge up memories for any audience member of how their country fell to pieces early in the pandemic – the early talk of it just ‘being bad in Wuhan’ and hopes for a quick lifting of restrictions made for an unpleasant reminder of Boris Johnson’s ‘done by Easter’ promise here in the UK. Shot through handheld cameras and often the character themselves’ phones, there’s a powerful immediacy to this morass of worry, and Ye is able to pull off that rarest of tricks in modern cinema in actually making smartphones cinematic.
This triumph is most clear during the actual lockdown section in the back half of the film, which is by far its strongest. As Jiang makes increasingly emotionally vulnerable calls back home and the in-hotel crew (all locked in their own rooms) try to maintain sanity with a group chat and regular facetime sessions, both the performances and the formal choices really come into their own. Digital communication on screen is mostly played for laughs (frozen Zoom-screen faces, stutters and misunderstandings, irritating audio echoes) or thrills (sudden disconnections, shaky audio), but Ye here commits to the tears and tragedy of it all, and it’s wildly effective.
Calls and group chats become weighted with urgent importance, half lifelines, half torturous reminders of the old world (I was myself reminded of those unbearably sad images of people saying final goodbyes to loved ones over an iPad screen). Ye even finds a way to turn a TikTok montage into something exquisitely moving, which is not something I honestly thought could be possible. Not all of the film’s moves into more outright documentary territory work as well as this one, especially right at the end as they start to drag out the conclusion, but when they hit, they’re an incredible reminder of the half-touching, half-embarrassing ways the world remained *human* in a surreal moment.
There’s a meta touch here too, as the film we’re watching starts to become the film the characters within the film are making (eventually mutating from the original drama into a documentary about their COVID hotel experiences), but Ye wears this very lightly. An Unfinished Film has limited interest in winking at the audience, a completely earnest take on a time that a lot of people have decided they never want to think about again but that we really shouldn’t forget.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 