For the second time in the last three editions, the Cannes Film Festival has opted for a comedy about the undead to kick off the competition. After ‘The Dead don’t die’ by Jim Jarmusch, this year Cannes has opened with ‘Coupez!‘, the new of Michel Hazanavicius.
As we already mentioned, it is a remake of ‘One Cut of the Dead’ (2017), one of the great cult phenomena of international cinema in recent years. The Japanese original, directed by Shin’ichirô Ueda, proposed a fun and charming metalinguistic game based on the filming of a story about zombies; If you haven’t enjoyed the movie yet, I won’t tell you any more about what happens. And perhaps it would be advisable for you to stop reading, just in case, the less you know the better.
The sequence shot of the dead
Hazanavicius it’s not too complicated. His film is a fairly close version of the Japanese film; it repeats the structure, the twists and practically recycles the same jokes. It is largely limited to following the original script to the letter, watering it with slight and unavoidable variations due to the translation to the French language, cinema and public. And surely out of pure common sense, from someone who is dedicated to telling stories.
It may all sound a bit disappointing unnecessary. And in part it is. BUT … It is still the work of the author of ‘The Artist’, where he drank from classic American cinema to create a very elegant and enjoyable which was a hit at the time, garnering numerous awards and an unexpected triumph at the Oscars (it won five statuettes, including best direction and best film). Hazanavicius may be lazy as a creator, but he is an intelligent and skilled filmmaker. And with a sense of humor.
His biggest decision when facing this project is embrace the absurd and try to turn it into an advantage. In this way, as in real life, the director of ‘Coupez’ (whom he brings to life Romain Duris) accepts the offer to shoot a French remake of a Japanese hit with zombies. And the one who entrusts the work to him is the same producer that the actress of the original embodies, Yoshiko Takehara.
So a new layer is added to this simple story that, deep down, revolves around the process of creating a fiction and also, more generally, comes to talk about the family, the one that is formed naturally by blood ties and the one that is professionally generated after intense production. That image of the human pyramid is beautiful as a metaphor for what a shoot can become: an almost impossible mission, a dream full of disappointments and frustrations that flirts with a nightmare. David Lynch told it his way on ‘Mulholland Drive’.
Previously known as ‘Z’, before a coincidence with a Russian symbol forced a change in title, the new French version is called ‘Coupez!’ a play on words with “couter” (“cut”) that works for both sides of the film, and of course, the letter “Z” that refers to the zombie. This joke is a perfect example of what Michel Hazanavicius’s work consists of.
It was the strangest thing that Cannes opted for a remake to open its contest, and I admit that I did not finish seeing anything clear, but I must say that the choice has been a success. Evidently, ‘Coupez!’ It doesn’t have the freshness of the original or the tremendous wow factor, but it’s a very effective and funny movie that leaves with a good taste in the mouth and wanting more cinema. If that is not what we ask of an inaugural film, I don’t know anymore. And people, they are French.
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