Source : the age
AN UNFINISHED FILM
Directed by Lou Ye
106 minutes, rated M
Selected cinemas
Reviewed by JAKE WILSON
★★★½
The intriguing thing about Lou Ye’s film is that at first, there’s no way to be sure what you’re looking at. Some kind of combination of fiction and documentary, it would appear: a caption tells us that the year is 2019, and a Chinese film crew is gathered around a studio monitor looking at footage from a film abandoned a decade earlier.
Just why the plug was pulled is open to speculation, but we can take a guess, given the story centres on a gay couple, an increasingly taboo subject in Chinese media since the 2000s (Lou has a history of battles with censors, and was officially banned from filmmaking for five years following his release of his 2006 Summer Palace, which deals with the Tiananmen Square massacre).
The unflappable director Xiaorui (Mao Xiaorui) still feels an obligation to complete the film, even if it can’t be shown publicly. His leading man, Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao), isn’t so sure. Time has moved on, he argues, and he has to focus on making a living, especially as he’s recently married with a child on the way.
An Unfinished Film is tricky – and gets trickier.
The casual, handheld style might lead you to suppose all this is happening for real – and even when the penny drops that Xiaorui and Jiang are fictional characters, it wouldn’t be illogical to think Lou has devised this framework as a way of making use of footage from a project he himself was unable to complete.
In fact, there was no actual “unfinished film”. The older material being recycled consists of outtakes and rehearsals from Lou’s previous features, including the 2009 Spring Fever, in which Qin did play a gay character named “Jiang Cheng” (and which was made without the Chinese government’s approval, officially as a co-production between Hong Kong and France).
This is tricky stuff, and it gets trickier. Jiang was planning to take some time off following the birth of his child, but reluctantly agrees to be available for reshoots around the time of the new year, which is to say late January 2020, going by the Western calendar.
Let’s see, what else was happening around then? Perhaps it’ll jog your memory if I mention that the cast and crew wind up staying in a hotel in the city of Wuhan in central China. This is roughly a quarter of the way into An Unfinished Film, after which it becomes a story about the pandemic.
Once lockdown is imposed, the focus shifts from Xiaorui to Jiang, who’s understandably desperate to get home to his family. He’s stuck in his hotel room for much of the central portion of the film, speaking tenderly with his wife (Qi Xi) on the Chinese equivalent of FaceTime.
These scenes underline the fictional nature of what we’re watching, letting us share Jiang’s solitude as no documentary could. Yet, Lou also weaves in authentic footage from the period.
As a historical chronicle, the film is open to interpretation. Sometimes it seems to be criticising the authoritarian way lockdown was imposed on the Chinese people, sometimes simply paying tribute to their collective resilience.
But all of this is set in the context of a story that started out as something completely different, which is to say we’re invited to reflect not only on the film Lou has made, but also the film he hasn’t made and perhaps can’t.
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