An unfinished film: A cinematic prodigy escaping any confinement (*****)

From Rob Savage's Host to Olivier Assayas ' Timeshare , John Hyams' Sick , and Natalie Morales' Language Lessons , the Covid pandemic has served equally well for horror and, mostly, introspection, or, if applicable, romantic comedy. Despite what it might seem given the strict rules of the 2020 global lockdown, Zoom and the certainty of being definitively alone despite everything became fertile ground for a cinema built on the viewer's imagination, exactly in that place outside the camera's focus where fear, uncertainty, and mystery reside. Human All Too Human. An unfinished film by Chinese director Lou Ye is not just another film on the subject, it is not a new, already belated example of the crisis that shook the world five years ago and that, given the pace at which current events are unfolding, we have almost forgotten. On the contrary, it's exactly the film that, in some ways, such a traumatic, dystopian, life-changing, and over-the-top event deserved. That's all it was.

The premise is confusing and unexpected enough to generate the highest expectations. Or the lowest, it doesn't matter. A director and his team decide to revisit the film they shot ten years ago, which they left unfinished. The idea is to see the possibility, despite the passage of time and life itself, of finishing what was left unfinished and doing it with the same team. That was a love story with betrayals in an inhospitable and very treacherous city. An unfinished film is presented as a film within a film, and its narrative concerns nothing more than the narrative itself, about how to narrate the perhaps unspeakable. Exactly.

At times, we're faced with a kind of intellectual and somewhat pedantic comedy, but a comedy nonetheless. And so it is until a pandemic breaks out during filming—a global pandemic. Suddenly, the entire production team is confined to the hotel, and, just as suddenly, what seemed like a cause for joy (the recovery of a forgotten story) gradually becomes first a horror film, later a melodrama, and finally, the most moving account of the memory of a tormented city. In the distance, one of the protagonists speaks on the phone with his wife, confined in Wuhan, the place where it all began, and amid the gaps, silences, and cracks left by the conversation, a desolate love story erupts on the screen, at least as traumatic, dystopian, decisive, and exaggerated as the all-infecting COVID itself.

Lou Ye, a director always obsessed with romanticism so close to amour fou, thus composes what we won't call the definitive film about Covid, but almost. An unfinished film reveals its own impossibility as it progresses, and in this recognition of its most intimate impotence, he manages to compose the most beautiful, vivid, mysterious, and contradictory portrait of a death that seems very close to love itself. And vice versa. Without a doubt, a prodigy of free and happy cinema escaping any imaginable confinement.

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Director : Lou Ye. Performers : Huang Xuan, Eric Qin, Qi Xi, Zhang Songwen. Duration : 106. Nationality : Singapore.