Review: Zombies chomp on a film crew in ‘Final Cut,’ a fun French remake that eats itself

There’s nothing more infectious than a good idea. In 2017, Japanese director Shinichiro Ueda released a $25,000 zombie movie called “One Cut of the Dead,” a genre-bending comedy with a structure so surprising that this review is honor bound to button its lips. The indie hit returned on its budget by 1,247% — the kind of shock profit that makes one imagine dazed audiences stumbling out of the theater and biting innocent bystanders until they, too, bought a ticket.

Naturally, it had to be remade. Rather unnaturally, it’s been remade by the Oscar-winning French director Michel Hazanavicius, best known as the auteur behind the black-and-white silent throwback “The Artist.” Hazanavicius is enough of an arthouse heavyweight that he was able to premiere “Final Cut,” his clever and oddly endearing redux, as the opening film at Cannes. He told the press that he expected to get booed.

It’s easy to see why. “Final Cut” opens with 30 minutes of a rote gnash-em-up. If a film could be ultra-mediocre — a paradox by definition — then this one is. The ingenue (Matilda Lutz) is a blank. The hero (Finnegan Oldfield) is a ham. And after the lovebirds have blown their 31st take, the director (Romain Duris) of this film-within-a-film barges in. “I want terror!” Duris screams. “I want sincerity!” Luckily for him, and unluckily for the cast and crew, real zombies arrive. The camera keeps rolling for an athletic and impressive half-hour of single-take real-time carnage. When blood spatters on the lens, it stays there until the unseen cinematographer wipes it off.

Honestly, it’s a little inept. Eventually, your mind tunes out the plot in order to snark about the craft. Why is that starlet screaming so much, you might think, before adding, charitably, that the actress playing the actress is a more committed scream queen than she seemed. To be fair, she and the rest of the team — the makeup head (Bérénice Bejo) who knows Krav Maga; the dismembered assistant director (Sébastien Chassagne) in relentless, brain-dead pursuit; and the invisible production crew who, presumably, must be racing around with blood spray and rubber limbs — are sure putting in an effort. Still, despite the pandemic fallout of a global filmmaking shutdown, surely this couldn’t have really opened Cannes?

Don’t boo yet. You’ll miss everything wonderful to come.

Romain Duris in a scene from the movie “Final Cut.”

(Kino Lorber)

Hazanavicius has made a movie that tests our ideas of creative genius. In this opening, he yanks us one direction — genius, this is not — and by the end, he’s prodded us to wonder if it is. That audience manipulation is its own act of brilliance. But Hazanavicius should properly refuse any credit. This is Ueda’s plot, mostly. (“Final Cut” even keeps the Japanese names, so we’re treated to the discordance of seeing a cast of French Caucasians call each other “Akira” and “Higurashi.”) Yet, Ueda tipped his own hat to an earlier play by Ryoichi Wada, and, even within these nesting influences, the point of the thing seems to be that the whole of a film set — the strange alchemy of actors, crew, and producers with all of their competing priorities — is far more powerful than any director.

Which is a heck of a generous thing for any director to admit, especially when Hazanavicius has a best director statuette on his mantle. That’s when it clicks that this trashy, goofy, giddy, sloppy gore-fest isn’t so different from “The Artist” after all. They both endear us to the behind-the-scenes struggles of, well, the artist, or in this case, these floundering and far-less-talented artistes.

“Final Cut” takes a few liberties with the original, which Hazanavicius’s faux filmmaking team is aware of. Smartly, he’s added a composer (Jean-Pascal Zadi) who stresses over when to time his dramatic stingers, as well as a light layer of cross-cultural tension when Ueda’s fictional producer (Donguri) returns as herself. (The 4-foot-10 comedian delivers an over-the-top performance that seems designed to catch the eye of David Lynch.)

Likewise, Hazanavicius also seizes the chance to exaggerate. The first-act klutziness is even klutzier, and he’s made the unfulfilling choice to shift our attention from the starlet to her egotistic male co-star, sacrificing her emotional arc for some low-hanging jokes about pretentious twits. At least Duris, his onscreen counterpart, is man (and meta) enough to cop to any mistakes, sighing, “The French aren’t always as advanced as the Japanese.”