Walking zhivits – Newspaper Kommersant No. 138 (7339) of 08/02/2022

Michel Hazanavicius’s comedy “Slaughter Montage” (Coupe), which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is being released. She came out much less viable than the walking dead, who are used here as an occasion for jokes, believes Yulia Shagelman.

The fate of the new film by the author of the popular comedy-spy trilogy about Agent 117, but most importantly, the Oscar-winning and popularly beloved “Artist” (2011), from the very beginning gave some absurdity. Right before the premiere in Cannes, it had to be urgently renamed: the original name “Z (means Z)”, which, against the backdrop of the Russian special operation in Ukraine, acquired completely unnecessary connotations, was replaced with “Montage” (in English localization “final”, in Russian, of course, “killer”, because this word is among the top three most beloved by our distributors, along with “beauty” and “drive”). Inside the film, however, a bad letter remained, and even famously inscribed across the screen with bright red paint, but there’s nothing to be done about it. Firstly, it is impossible to remove it purely technically, and secondly, it denotes, one might say, the main characters of the picture – zombies.

Killer Cut is a film about a film crew making a low budget film about a film crew making a low budget zombie film and being attacked by real zombies. This matryoshka concept looks quite wild, potentially witty and meta-ironic, but the French director did not come up with it himself. His new film is already the third “movie about cinema” after The Artist and Young Godard (2017), but this time Hazanavicius was not just inspired by something (be it silent cinema or the French new wave, as before), but for some reason, he made almost a frame-by-frame remake of the debut film of the Japanese young talent Shinichiro Ueda “Zombies with one plan!” (2017), which has become a cult classic in certain circles, mainly among critics and fans of non-standard auteur cinema.

If you do not know about this, the beginning of the “Editing” can lead to bewilderment. Before us, the final zombie horror is played out: the “last girl” (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) is attacked by her boyfriend (Finnegan Oldfield), who has turned into a living dead man. But before he bites her in the neck with a deadly bite, a cry of “Stop!” is heard, and the director of this “masterpiece” (Romain Duris) appears on the screen. He attacks a couple in the best traditions of the crazy outers of the past, now recognized as abusive and unprofessional: he yells at the girl that she plays badly and insincerely, and even slaps the guy. The frustrated actors are comforted by a make-up artist (Berenice Bejo), but then it turns out that they have more serious problems: the shooting takes place in a building where the ghosts of tortured prisoners of war live, and now they have awakened. Members of the film crew begin to turn into zombies one by one, artificial blood is gushing, a bitten off hand is passed from one whole hand to another, the director runs around with the camera, maniacally reveling in the fact that now he has achieved real sincerity, for some reason everyone is called Japanese names, and this deliberately poorly played bacchanalia lasts 35 minutes, shot, of course, in one shot.

While the audience, unfamiliar with the original, is trying to understand what it was, the action is transferred to three months ago, and we get to know the characters again. Crazed director Higurashi turns out to be French director Rémy Bouillon, who can shoot “quickly, cheaply and disgracefully”. It is for these qualities that he is hired by the Japanese producer Madame Matsuda (Yoshiko Takehara), who needs an inexpensive film to launch a new streaming service that will only play zombie movies. Remy gathers a team, and in the next hour and a half (Shinichiro Ueda, it should be noted, he put his tape in full in this timing, perhaps that is why his humor, unlike Hazanavicius, does not have time to get bored) she will shoot the same film that we have already watched overcoming every conceivable obstacle. For example, the sudden need to replace the two leading actors right on the set, the third’s alcoholism, the fourth’s diarrhea, and the tedium of the main star, constantly arguing with the director. As well as cultural differences with the Japanese – here xenophobic jokes are used that sounded in the second part of the Taxi trilogy 22 years ago and have not become more witty during this time.

If filmed for a ridiculous $25,000, Shinichiro Ueda’s film was a hymn to the pure joy of being able to pick up a camera and create, despite budget constraints, technical difficulties and constant stress, then Hazanavicius is trying to repeat this trick already for several million. And here, as expected, he lacks the very sincerity with which the actors of the film had problems in the film, as well as the love passion for the material that distinguished the “Artist” and even “Young Godard”, merciless to his hero. When, in the finale, Remy’s entire film crew, forgetting about their differences, stands on each other’s shoulders to replace the crane that was broken on the set, this should, in theory, be a symbol of the indestructible vitality of cinema. But it’s a reminder of how much people and effort it takes to make a bad movie.