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New European
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Ari Aster's Eddington is not the great Covid movie we've been waiting for
Towards the bottom of the list in seriousness but nonetheless significant has been the poor cinematic creations it spawned. Filmmakers made insipid diary-like responses – Luca Guadagnino (Fiori, Fiori, Fiori!) and Alice Rohrwacher (Four Roads) both contributed to this woebegotten genre. One of the better ones was Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye's An Unfinished Film, which showed in Cannes last year, a hybrid documentary lumbered with an unprepossessing title. The Covid-19 pandemic kept us apart and then brought us together. Then, after brief moments of solidarity with others and of celebration when the vaccine emerged, came the side effects. It divided us as communities, created mental health crises, educational shortcomings and uncertainty, increased alienation and fostered an environment where conspiracy theories grew like pustules. Meanwhile, studios delayed the release of films, and shot films with visible social distancing protocols in place. The content was not great and the industry suffered as theatres shuttered and viewing habits skewed towards streaming even more than they had previously. An honorable mention must go to Rob Savage's Host, a horror film about a seance, filmed in the midst of the pandemic and taking place on a Zoom call. Inspired by a prank that went viral, it was a great example of an improvised solution to terrible conditions. But arguably, the best response had already come years before the virus arrived, with Steven Soderbergh's 2011 disaster movie Contagion. Cannes itself was cancelled by Covid in 2020 and had the next year's edition moved from its regular slot by two months. The festivals which took place in the shadow of the virus featured strict protocols of daily spit tests – the Lord knows the environmental costs of disposing of all that cinephile saliva – and there were distancing measures, temperature checks and masks to be worn everywhere. Unlike in the US, such measures were relatively uncontroversial. I visited Bergamo a few months after it had become one of the first hot spots in Europe with eye-watering mortality rates. God help you if you didn't wear your mask there. The devastated community policed itself strictly and with little wiggle room. Now we're past the pandemic and no longer constrained by its fears or protocols, we can look back on it as a period of recent history. Ari Aster's Eddington, which premiered at Cannes this week, is the first major Hollywood film to be set during the pandemic and to use it as a motivating theme and backdrop. The film is set in a New Mexico town in May 2020. The lockdown has only just begun and for many places such as this county, the pandemic is something that still feels remote. Joaquin Phoenix plays a local sheriff, Joe Cross, who is rubbed up the wrong way by the new protocols which he is supposed to be enforcing, but with which he refuses to comply, partly due to his asthma, partly out of boneheaded stubbornness. At home, Joe's wife Louise (Emma Stone) is recovering from a mental health problem and this situation is worsened by the enforced stay of his mother-in-law, Dawn (Deidre O'Connell), who divides her time berating them and rabbit-holing into conspiracy theories. Things deteriorate further when Sheriff Joe – the name has to be a sly reference to anti-immigrant Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio whose infamy was a brief fart on the winds of history – decides to join the mayoral race to unseat Mayor Ted Chavez, a local bar owner, played by Pedro Pascal, who once dated Louise. So with major Hollywood star power, a talented and visionary director (Aster has directed the excellent horror films Hereditary and Midsommar), could this be the first film to really nail the experience of the Covid period? Unfortunately, the answer has to be a resounding no. In his last film Beau Is Afraid, Aster depicted anxiety by making a panic attack of a movie. So here, in his new film and in order to depict cynicism, divided society and a post-truth world, he makes a deeply cynical, divisive and fact-phobic film. Everything is rotten in the town of Eddington, even people who want to change the system. Reformers like Mayor Chavez are hypocrites with their own financial agendas. White Black Lives Matter protestors are ridiculed for their narcissism and guilt. Aster might claim to be even-handed but his targets – white liberals alongside bigots and nutso conspiracy theorists are not so much low-hanging fruit as windfall. The story is chock-a-block with plot, and references everything from Amazon delivery vans to Mary-Taylor Greene, gun enthusiasts to TikTok, Pizzagate to 9/11. Someone even mentions the fact that the Titanic didn't really sink. Wow. This goes deep. I saw this video on YouTube. Austin Butler wanders into the film as a guru, dressed like Jared Leto at his most messianic, using numerology to unmask pedophile plots, and wanders out of it again. Meanwhile, as protests become riots, Joe becomes increasingly unhinged in his mayoral campaign, using his office and vehicle to campaign. Conflicts soon escalate into murder and gun battles that resemble Call of Duty, or a season finale of the Fargo TV series. This is the America of MAGA, though Trump isn't mentioned. The madness is so self-evidently linked to him, it hardly seems necessary. One can certainly feel the paranoia, confusion and boredom-inspired madness of lockdown, but Covid itself hasn't really arrived and so the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers – such as Joe – are initially more credible. And this perhaps gets to the heart of how difficult it is to make a film about Covid. That spiky Corona is microscopic so what's to see? And masks look stupid. They're fiddly and obscure the landscape that most entranced John Ford: the human face. Conspiracies are more compelling from a plot point of view than scientific, fact-based explanations. They are, after all, plots. Plus a maverick individual, like Sheriff Joe, occupies a sacred role in the American mythos. He's Gary Cooper in High Noon, Shane in Shane, standing for the rights of the individual even if it means standing against progress and pesky social distancing. Even as he descends into something like psychosis and Covid itself asserts its invisible grip, as an audience we follow him and might even cheer him as it morphs into a latter-day Rambo figure. American cinema celebrates rogue individuals even as it might ostensibly condemn them: think of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, or Harry Callaghan in Dirty Harry. In fact, that latter character could well sum up the misanthropy that runs through Ari Aster's film: 'That's one thing about our Harry. He doesn't play any favourites! Harry hates everybody.' That's the thing about our Ari too. He hates everybody: liberals, conservatives, antifa…
ABC News
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
This COVID-19 film is set right near Wuhan in mid-2019, straddling both documentary and fiction
An Unfinished Film is likely to repel those of us who refuse to be catapulted back to the strange, surreal and terrifying year of 2020. But what differentiates Lou Ye's docufiction film — beyond its layer upon layer of constructed meaning — is that it comes to us from the eye of the storm: a town near Wuhan. Fast facts about An Unfinished Film What: A meta, self-referential docufiction film that takes you to ground zero of COVID-19. Directed by: Lou Ye Starring: Mao Xiaorui, Qin Hao, Qi Xi Where: In cinemas now Likely to make you feel: An intense feeling of déjà vu As the severity of a new virus is making itself known, a film's cast and crew — a microcosm of millions of Chinese citizens — grapple with authoritarian dictates, enforced separations from their loved ones, and mounting pandemonium as billions of people around the world continue their lives unscathed, unaware things are about to indelibly change. The film doesn't start in this place, however. It opens in mid-2019 with a crew, led by director Xiaorui (Mao Xiaorui), unearthing a 10-year-old computer with footage of the director's aborted queer film. This half-finished film is cobbled together from real-life outtakes and b-roll captured for Lou's own previous films, but the conceit surrounding its rediscovery is fictional — the first of many instances throughout the film where fact and fiction are interweaved and the boundary between pretence and reality is muddied. The unfinished film is an intimate one, centred on a queer man desiring someone who's already in a relationship, with actor Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao, who did play a gay man in a Lou film) the lead. Qin Hao (l) also played a main character called Jiang in Lou's 2009 film Spring Fever, and footage from that is used in the film. ( Supplied: Sharmill ) Filming was suspended due to creative differences with the funders — gesturing towards China's strict censorship laws — but Xiaorui wants to resume shooting it — partly out of a guilt he feels towards the cast and crew, partly due to a deep-seated desire to see it realised as a fully formed thing. In a thoughtful debate between the introspective director Xiaorui and the frank Jiang Cheng — with the former trying to convince the latter to come back on board to finish the film — Lou raises interesting questions. What's the point of making art? Assuming the film doesn't pass the censorship board and make it into cinemas, who's the film in service of? The same questions could be asked of An Unfinished Film, which can't be shown in China to the very people who lived through what it's documenting. Fast forward to February 2019 and it's clear Jiang Cheng has relented to reshooting the film. Fresh off the birth of his baby son, Paopao, he's staying in a hotel near Wuhan with cast and crew as they finish shooting the film's last few scenes. But providence has other plans for them. A mysterious illness is taking hold of Wuhan, and the authorities act swiftly and decisively, cordoning off the hotel to anyone entering or leaving after a crew member collapses from what is later confirmed to be COVID. Mao Xiaorui (l), who is a director himself, plays director Xiaorui in An Unfinished Film. ( Supplied: Sharmill ) Cue an imposed lockdown for all the cast and crew left behind, including Jiang Cheng, who becomes the eyes through which we witness the early stages of the pandemic unfold. Confined to his room after a thwarted attempt to escape the hotel, he occupies himself by filming goings-on from his window and engaging in the Chinese equivalent of FaceTime with his emotionally frayed wife Sang Qi (Qi Xi) as their lives transpire in parallel — he under hotel arrest, she under house arrest caring for their infant son. Stripped bare of any artifice, the naked intensity of their conversations captures a couple in crisis — their unbridled happiness at being new parents is tinged with a heightened feeling of vulnerability as they're besieged by stories of families split up in the ensuing melee. "I am such a coward now," Jiang Cheng remarks as he contemplates his oversized importance to his family. Their shared grief brings out truisms, but clichés are clichés for a reason. Many things about Lou's film will jump out to a Western audience. One of them is the striking readiness of everyone in the hotel to immediately don a mask once it's clear a mysterious illness is afoot. It's regarded as the natural thing to protect oneself and others, instead of something contestable that infringes upon one's person-hour, as it's been construed in the West. In the blend of documentary and feature, DOP Jian Zeng appears here as himself. ( Supplied: Sharmill ) With most of the film confined to the four walls of Jiang Cheng's hotel room, it necessarily loses the momentum of the frenzied scenes that accompanied the rollout of the hotel's lockdown and veers into something far more mundane and repetitious — befitting the new rhythm of Jiang Cheng's days. The discombobulation of the moment in time is adroitly captured by Lou in a move similar to The Seed of the Sacred Fig's director, Mohammad Rasoulof, who A particularly memorable montage ensues when quarantined cast and crew jump on a group call to celebrate the eve of Lunar New Year, their giddy delirium at celebrating together in isolation capturing something highly distinct and unforgettable about those early moments of connection in the pandemic. Lou wrote the script with his wife and longtime co-writer, Ma Yingli, who's also a director. ( Supplied: Sharmill ) The effect of the film disperses slightly when it moves from its fly-on-the-wall approach to the swift documenting of various events of the time through the framing of a mobile phone. The February 2020 death of At a time when the broader world has erroneously moved on from safeguarding against a life-threatening virus, it's striking to be transported back to a time and place so unlike the West: where walls were scrubbed clean to prevent contamination, hotels were locked down due to a single positive case of COVID, and people were quarantined without an end in sight. A sort of undeniable truth emerges from a film too fictive to be considered a documentary but too factual to be considered a feature. And within it, perhaps there is some hope of collective catharsis for China. Loading YouTube content
New York Times
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘An Unfinished Film' Review: When Reality Interrupts Art
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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
