Michel Hazanavicius is a Lithuanian-born French filmmaker who is still best known for the unexpected Oscar winner for Best Picture in 2011, The Artist. That black-and-white comedy shot in the silent film technique also brought him the Oscar for best director, but since then he has not repeated even an approximate success. Of course, this does not mean that Hazanavicius is not a capable and skilled director, and he confirmed this in the horror comedy, which is actually a remake of the hilarious Japanese film “One Cut of the Dead”. I stumbled upon this crazy zombie comedy a few years ago and Shinichiro Ueda’s micro-budget film was a real revelation, an incredibly innovative and masterfully shot film that went on to gross over $30 million on a budget of $25,000.
It was a movie about making a low-budget zombie movie during which zombies actually show up and start chasing the film crew, and Hazanavicius decided to stick with the same concept. And his “Coupez!” or the “Final Cut” is split into three segments, and now it’s a remake of a remake of a Japanese zombie movie that actually features zombies. And again, it’s top-notch banter, first-class entertainment that at first seems like a guerilla low-budget film, but by the end we’ll understand that nothing here is guerilla and everything here is extremely well thought out and organized. Although it may not seem like it.
In the first part, we follow the shooting of the film in one continuous frame. For the first thirty minutes, we are on the set of a trash movie about zombies shot by Remi (Romain Duris), and when that part ends, we move a few months into the past and see how the same Remi accepted the offer to shoot a quick, cheap horror movie in a short period of time. will be streamed directly on some platform. A director whose career could hardly be called successful agreed to this experiment, and we then follow the pre-production and production problems and difficulties in the creation of the remake of the Japanese blockbuster that the Japanese producers are asking him to do. However, when the time comes for the actual filming, everything will turn into complete chaos and in the last and most entertaining segment, we follow how the filming actually looked from the very beginning.
So even though this concept may sound not only complicated, but also completely silly, once again the idea devised by the Japanese Ueda worked brilliantly. And just as “The Artist” was a tribute to old, silent film and the way movies were made back then, “Final Cut” is also a tribute to filmmaking, technique and poking fun at what film actually is. And that is the creation of an illusion, a fiction, an imitation of life whose task is to make the viewer believe what he sees on the screen, even though he is probably quite clear that what he sees is directed and acted. Hazanavicius did a great job in that almost experimental film, a horror comedy during which we actually understand what it’s like to shoot such a film.