An Unfinished Film. 2024. Singapore/Germany. Directed by Lou Ye. Courtesy Film Movement. New York premiere. In Mandarin; English subtitles. 105 min.
The most radically ambitious feature to come out of Cannes this past year, Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film is nothing less than a reinvention of all the Chinese filmmaker’s work to date, his response to a world suddenly suspended in time by the outbreak of COVID and increasingly mediated through digital interfaces. Ostensibly the story of a movie crew trapped in a hotel in Wuhan during the earliest days of the pandemic—the images of the phantom city under siege are hauntingly unnerving, to be sure—An Unfinished Film creates multiple meanings through layer upon layer of reality (films within films within films). It draws on cell phone, CCTV, and news footage; outtakes and on-set documentary material from Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000), Spring Fever (2009), Mystery (2012), and The Shadow Play (2018); and real-time responses to the unfolding global health crisis, to become a meditation—sometimes playful, sometimes unsettling, always subversive—on invention, improvisation, and chance both in the creative process and in life.