It’s a little hard to get a grasp on what “An Unfinished Film” is at first. This semifictional drama opens with a film crew booting up a 10-year-old computer, hoping their footage will still be there. And after a little finagling, the screen springs to life. Director Xiaorui (Mao Xiaorui) watches, rapt, as a younger version of himself appears onscreen.
This is a film he tried to make 10 years ago, but abandoned for reasons that start to become clear as he explains the plot to others. Director Xiaorui watches as his aborted film’s star, Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao), appears onscreen as well, and starts to get some ideas. Jiang is now a big movie star, married and with a baby on the way, but when the director calls and asks him if they might try to finish the film, he’s intrigued. Why not?
This is a straightforward enough start to a movie, but it’s all a little meta. For instance, Mao, the actor who plays the director, has served as assistant director to Lou Ye, the actual director of “An Unfinished Film.” And Qin, who plays Jiang Cheng, is another frequent Lou collaborator. The footage that they’re watching is in fact outtakes and B-roll from others of Lou’s films, including “Suzhou River,” “Mystery,” “Spring Fever” and “The Shadow Play.” And Lou has some experience with filmmaking stops and starts; his movies have repeatedly been banned in China for running afoul of censors, and he has been put under several-year prohibitions from filmmaking several times as well — dictates he has at times ignored.
So this feels personal for Lou, and it keeps getting more personal, in ways that global audiences will easily understand. Director Xiaorui, Jiang and the crew decide to shoot the rest of the film just before the Chinese New Year — but it’s January 2020, and they’re shooting in a hotel located near Wuhan. News of a virus spreads. By the time they decide to shut down production and head to their homes to wait it out, it’s too late. After some confusion and panic that feels ripped straight from zombie films, things become eerily quiet. Everyone must quarantine, alone, in their rooms. They don’t know when they’ll get out.
Now reality narrows down to what they can see on their phones and computer screens, including for Jiang, whose wife, Sang Qi (Qi Xi), is increasingly panicked about Jiang ever making it home. Alone in his room, trying to retain his sanity, he watches the world coping with quarantine, observing videos of people dancing and recording his own videos for his child.
In evoking this all too familiar reality, Lou and his cinematographer Zeng Jian often break the screen into thirds, with vertical video interrupting the wider-screen footage. Sometimes the crew have video group chat happy hours and commiserate about being stuck. More often, Jiang is alone. In one poignant scene, the screen is entirely pitch-black except for a tiny spot of light in which Jiang’s face appears, illuminated by his phone.
As quarantine drags on, Lou brings more documentary footage of the pandemic, particularly in Wuhan, into the fictionalized footage. It’s apparently footage shot by real people, uploaded to the internet in a way that recalls the protest videos that appear in the film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” — stealth civilian clips that reveal what official reports can hide. So we watch doctors dance with patients. We see images of a cityscape in Wuhan apparently shot from a window as a trumpet plays to commemorate a whistle-blowing doctor who has died. We hear people in mourning and watch as drivers in Wuhan honor the dead by blowing their car horns for three minutes.
There’s a sense of space and time compression throughout, of Lou’s movie’s world crashing into our own, and of the familiar, tricky roles that screens and cameras played during those times, whether the holders were under strict lockdown, as in China, or under looser social recommendations, as in much of the United States.
By the end of “An Unfinished Film,” it is clear that this was never a movie about Director Xiaorui’s truncated footage at all. The question of whether that story will ever be finished hangs over most of “An Unfinished Film,” but it’s a query that starts to feel beside the point. Life gets in the way of art all the time, and art can be made out of life. What matters, the movie suggests, is hanging onto one another for dear life.
An Unfinished Film
Not rated. In Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.
