From the Director of ‘The Artist,’ Something Completely Different

“Final Cut,” the new film by Michel Hazanavicius, is a clever confection, a cinematic joke with an annoying wind-up and a tepid follow-through. But the punchline? The punchline is wonderful because it puts everything that came before it under a revealing light. Mr. Hazanavicius’s picture is, at its core, a self-reflexive endeavor that slips a whoopie cushion under a bevy of diligently placed assumptions. You’ll groan, look at your watch, and then, if patient, you’ll almost certainly laugh. Likely uproariously.Mr. Hazanavicius based his film on a 2017 picture by Japanese director Shin’ichirō Ueda — “One Cut of the Dead!” — that was, in turn, predicated on Ryoichi Wada’s stage play “Ghost in the Box.” Not being familiar with either property, I can’t vouchsafe what Mr. Hazanavicius brought to the table, other than a stellar cast of French actors that includes his wife, Bérénice Bejo. You’ll recall that Ms. Bejo was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 2011 for “The Artist,” a film that garnered Mr. Hazanavicius Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. Their latest venture is, let’s say, different.Something different and something off, at least initially. As “Final Cut” opens, we’re at the beginning of a horror film whose budget can’t be more than a few euros deep. The cinematography is grainy; the lighting, garish. A male zombie herks-and-jerks his way through an abandoned office building somewhere in the suburbs of Paris. The creature’s teeth and pallor are patently cut-rate. The monster approaches a woman wielding an ax. He goes to bite her neck. The woman’s response: “I love you.” Whereupon we hear the word, “Cut.”We’re on a movie set overseen by Remi (Romain Duris), who proceeds to read the riot act to Ava, his lead actress (a lissome Matilda Lutz). When Raphaël (Finnegan Oldfield), the actor playing the zombie, steps in to defend Ava, Remi hauls back and smacks him upside the head. Remi storms off, a break is called, and make-up artist Nadia (Ms. Bejo) goes to work, all the while regaling the actors with a rumor about the building in which they’re filming. It was, you see, the site of experiments conducted by the Japanese army to bring the dead back to life. Ava looks on incredulously. “The Japanese army?” Again, something is off here.Our characters, for instance, all have Japanese names and their adventures are given to stilted languors, stymied conversations, and anomalous moments of musical accompaniment. All the while, the film “Z” — the title hits the screen with an exaggerated splat of red — continues apace. The movie within a movie then encounters an attack by actual zombies, who, all the same, are not altogether credible even though their bodily emissions sometimes appear disconcertingly real. To the victor go the spoils, which, in this case, is a blood-drenched Ava staring defiantly at the camera as it swoops upward to dramatic effect. The end.But, no, not really: It is then that the “Final Cut” shifts to a calendar of days that predate the filming of “Z.” We learn that the movie is the brain trust of Mme. Matsuda (Yoshiko Takehara), a wealthy old woman who is eager to fund an innovative venture: a 30-minute creature feature that will be livestreamed, in a single take, on a new entertainment platform. Mr. Hazanavicius’s film revolves around this spindly conceit and, to his credit, he buzzes over it lightly, if only to introduce the true characters at the center of the movie. Chief among them is Remi, who is less a volatile genius than a sad-sack journeyman. His cinematic credo is “cheap, fast, and decent.”The picture’s final act is dedicated to the making of Mme. Matsuda’s pet project, and it is here that the comedy picks up steam and pulls out the stops. Essentially, we rewatch the first third of our movie — that is to say, “Final Cut” which is also, of course, “Z” — but with the added insight as to what went into its making. There’s nothing Mr. Hazanavicius won’t stoop to for a laugh as he doles out behind-the-scenes footage and, good for him, scores on even the most tasteless of gags. Play the waiting game and you’ll find this not-so-zombie movie raucously hilarious, surprisingly touching, and perhaps even a bit corny. “Final Cut” is great fun.

From the Director of ‘The Artist,’ Something Completely Different

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