You can always count on Chinese director Lou Ye to propose a film with a complex meta narrative which blurs the boundary between fiction and reality, dreams, fantasies and facts (the way his celebrated “Suzhou River” did). “An Unfinished Film”, his latest, follows the same path, also tackling the kind of topical issues that have landed Ye in hot water with censorship in the past.
An Unfinished Film is screening at San Diego Asian Film Festival
The story starts simply enough: a film director wants to complete a gay romance movie he begun 10 years before but left unfinished. He manages to convince the cast and crew to reunite, and the shooting starts. Unfortunately, the time is January 2020, and the place is Wuhan, China. Soon, as the Covid 19 outbreak starts in earnest, the shooting is suspended and the hotel where the crew is staying is put under immediate lockdown.
The rest of the film follows the daily experiences of the crew as they must remain under strict quarantine in their separate rooms. They find themselves stranded far from their loved ones and even from each other, hoping the lockdown will only last a day or two. As the days and weeks stretch, their loneliness and despair become more and more palpable, but also the touching resilience human beings are capable of.
Check the interview with the director
Much of the story is filmed through point-of-view shots taken through smartphones, while other scenes are shot through a handheld camera. This can lead you to believe you are watching a documentary that was actually filmed there and then. Many of the film crew who worked on “An Unfinished Film” play themselves inside the fiction, while the main actor of the fictional film is played by the always excellent Qin Hao, a regular of Ye’s films (he played a character with the same name in “Spring Fever”, establishing a possible narrative connection between the two movies).
This helps blur any sense that this is in fact pure fiction. Everything looks, sounds and above all feels real, in particular the raw emotions expressed by everyone in front of the camera, especially Hao. His wife is pregnant and he will miss his child’s birth, and you have to admire the way he manages to be so intense when interacting with a computer or smartphone screen.
What is wonderful about “An Unfinished Film” is how it uses technology to make us share these people’s points of view, relying to great effect on the smartphone screens that are everywhere in our daily lives. This is what many of us, to some extent, experienced during Covid after all, and few films have managed so well to convey what it was like to have one’s life and feelings filtered through and expressed by technology 24 hours a day.
This also creates a feeling of deep loneliness and longing for connection, establishing a possible theme in the way technology and social media can enable or prevent such connection. We are all trying to connect, with other people and in a way ourselves, and at this point you are reminded of the deeply personal film the director was trying to complete at the beginning. Perhaps the camera, whether the cinema or webcam type, can actually help us establish this type of connection, by allowing us to tell stories about ourselves and our personal experiences.
Gradually Lou Ye shifts its focus from the individual to the collective as he shows his characters cheerfully celebrating the Chinese New Year, in the virtual togetherness that became the norm during the Covid crisis. This is an exhilarating moment and a welcome relief from the sheer dread one feels at many points. Especially as real footage from the lockdown and videos from Douyin (the Chinese TikTok) are then shown on screen, blurring once more the border between fiction and reality and infusing the film with even more emotionality.
The movie can also feel very claustrophobic, and it could easily have turned into a thriller. This makes the sequence of a character finally being able to go out and film the eerily empty streets of Wuhan all the more stunning. You have to wonder how Ye managed to shoot this movie, and what in fact the consequences might be for him and his crew.
The lockdowns are a sensitive issue in China, and the authorities are not necessarily shown from the most favorable angle here (although there is nothing obviously subversive). In fact, one can wonder whether this is a return for Ye to his underground, politically engaged roots (Ye was banned from filmmaking for five years after making “Summer Palace”, which dealt with the Tiananmen protests and crackdown).
When they watch the 10-year-old footage early in the film, the crew explicitly mention censorship as an issue, since the would-be film openly deals with a gay relationship. This is a way of saying that what was possible in 2009 China no longer is today (although “Spring Fever” itself was shot illegally at the time).
In any case, this is a return to form for one of the most talented, and least celebrated, of Chinese filmmakers working today, often at his own risk. And there is nothing fictional about that.
