False start for the Cannes Film Festival: not convincing Final Cut, the film by Michel Hazanavicius which inaugurated the first evening of the 75th edition of the French kermesse, at the end of a ceremony in which Volodymyr Zelensky also spoke by videoconference. The Ukrainian president sued The great dictatorunderlining how much a “new Charlie Chaplin” is needed in today’s world.
Waning phase
Con Final CutHazanavicius confirms the waning phase of his post career The Artist (his most important and remembered film), which was followed by several mediocre titles such as The Search, My Godard e The forgotten prince.
Unfortunately, this new feature film is no exception, a zombie-comedy with a metacinematographic flavor focused on the making of a “film within a film” that seems to soon veer towards disaster. During the making, however, while everyone is ready to shoot a new scene, the crew is shocked by the arrival of real living dead. It is curious that already in 2019 the Cannes Film Festival had chosen another zombie-comedy for the inauguration: The dead don’t die by Jim Jarmusch which unfortunately turned out to be one of the lowest points in the career of the extraordinary American director, confirming that it is not easy to be original within a very specific trend that has already produced several valid works in recent decades. Think of Shaun of the dead insane of Edgar Wright Welcome to Zombieland by Ruben Fleischer, just to mention some of the Western titles of this (sub) genre that have created real conventions.
Remake of a fun Japanese movie
It should also be noted that Michel Hazanavicius’s screenplay does not start from an original idea, but is a remake of a funny Japanese film unfortunately little known in our country: Zombie contro Zombie – One Cut of the Dead by Shin’ichiro Ueda. If that film already played with parody (with reference, for example, to Diary of the Dead by the master of horror George A. Romero) it is undoubtedly difficult to find noteworthy ideas in Final Cuta film that was initially supposed to be called Z (like Z). Since the letter Z has taken on an ambiguous meaning with the war of aggression waged against Ukraine by the Russian government, the director has decided to change the title (the French original is Cut!). The film also manages to give it a few laughs here and there, but the poverty of the script and a certain general redundancy make it increasingly difficult to get involved as the minutes pass. a stage like that of the Cannes Film Festival would have deserved a much better opening.
