TORONTO — Director Lou Ye, a member of the sixth generation of Chinese cinema, a movement of filmmakers creating subversive, unvarnished depictions of urban life in post-Tiananmen China, returns five years after Saturday Fiction (2019) with An Unfinished Film (2024), a docudrama about preservation and censorship during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Surveying a film crew in Wuhan who decide to revive a project abandoned 10 years prior, only to be placed under lockdown during shooting, the film constitutes Lou’s latest attempt to replicate the slipperiness of cultural memory through a fabricated narrative that features archival and social media footage.
Shot documentary-style, An Unfinished Film begins on July 15th, 2019, crucially the anniversary of the publication of a canto by Chinese poet Yu Dafu, which is read aloud at the conclusion of Lou’s 2009 neo-noir Spring Fever — the first of many equivalencies between the two films. On that day, Mao Xiaorui, assistant director to Spring Fever, who plays a fictional version of himself here, engages in a modern-age rite: rebooting a clunky, decade-old computer that stores a suite of film footage from an untitled older project. These “scenes” actually comprise collected outtakes from Lou’s Spring Fever, Suzhou River (2000), Mystery (2012), and The Shadow Play (2018). The found footage inspires Mao to create a second half of the film shot in the present day, where Jiang (Qin Hao), the original film’s main character, starts a booming real estate business. (This rather drably realist arc mirrors the trajectory of An Unfinished Film.)
Jiang reminds Mao of the conditions of their unfinished film, which they abandoned in 2009 after Chinese censorship laws suppressed it for its gay themes. This exchange recalls the country’s ban of Spring Fever due to its depiction of a same-sex tryst eroding a marriage. But Mao feels an obligation to “make things right” by granting the film and its makers a promising second lease. An Unfinished Film then lurches forward to January 22nd, 2020, three days before Chinese New Year, with the crew filming scenes with Jiang.
There is a slinking sense of disorder by this point in the film: people abruptly leaving the set, a heightened sense of bureaucracy, crew in masks and inspectors in surgical gowns, and Mao discussing reshoots in hushed tones, clueing us into the impending restrictions. When outbound traffic in Wuhan is blocked, the crew is forcibly quarantined in a hotel where they communicate exclusively over video calls. Mao encourages them to photograph, videotape, save, and screenshot everything they can.
Lou’s quest for preservation is deeply felt in these sequences, in which the original 2009 film is disenfranchised twice over. An Unfinished Film becomes a project of accumulation, incorporating real footage of violent public displays in Wuhan and encouraging viewers to consider how reality is manufactured through this blurry, half-concocted narrative. But the ubiquity of these onscreen conditions, like most films that thematize the pandemic, is suitably underwhelming, and detaches the film from its queer roots.
The visual grammar of the film is incongruous with Lou’s typically gritty, neorealist sensibilities — his scenes are often shot with DV camcorders — and instead boasts eerily familiar sights of Zoom recordings and backlit phone screens dancing along faces in the dark. It becomes a clatter of virtual voices and images — a multiplicity of narratives that should in theory suit the story of a pliable film object remade in the image of the times, but in practice becomes caught up in reenvisioning an ongoing phenomenon. The promise of a lost queer film finally finding its audience is quashed by imposing tech and Jiang’s narrative of a straight nuclear family; the dissonance of watching their baby grow through a screen is affecting, but An Unfinished Film tediously reroutes its priorities. Lou’s plea for collectivity is certainly personal, configuring a world where his proxy and collaborators attempt the impossible, but as Mao puts it himself, this is a labor ever-unfinished.
An Unfinished Film (2024), directed by Lou Ye, screened recently at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film will be available in theaters in the United States in 2025.
