A young woman, backed into the corner of a room, her bloodstained tank top and an ax in her hand, tries to keep a livid creature at bay.
Hungry for human flesh, the zombie rushes towards his neck.
She lets out a cry.
Behind them, the director sighs.
After 42 takes, the scene is still performed execrable.
Regardless, the filming of his independent horror film must continue at all costs.
So when real zombies start attacking the team, the filmmaker gloats.
The dread will only be more authentic.
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Take
The Blair Witch Project
, replace the invisible supernatural with junk zombies, douse copiously with a hilarious second degree, mix in a slobbery thirty-minute sequence shot, sprinkle with a surprise pinch of homage to the film industry, heat up in Japan.
There you go, you have
Don't Cut!
, a film by Shinichiro Ueda.
Or, at least, its first part.
A phenomenon at the Japanese box office five years ago, the feature film inspired Michel Hazanavicius to make his new film,
Cut!.
In theaters from Tuesday evening, this kitschissime horror production also sneaked in against all odds at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival.
Cut!
is not the first zombie film to inaugurate an edition of the Cannes event -
The Dead Don't Die
by Jim Jarmusch grilled the politeness to him in 2019. Some may be surprised at the honor given to the facetious adaptation of a cheap parody, even signed Michel Hazanavicius.
Yet the fake blood and necrotic flesh in painted plaster of
Don't Cut!
hide their game well. By a clever mise en abyme, the story conceived by Shinichiro Ueda changes completely at the third of the feature film.
What was once just a banal rehash, to the marrow, of a zombie movie is transformed into something more.
This twist transforms the modest comedy horror into an unexpected and joyful celebration of elusive cinematic magic and resilience in the face of the unexpected.
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Driven by tremendous word-of-mouth,
Don't Cut!
seduced Japanese and then South Korean audiences and garnered more than $27 million.
A fairy tale for the entire film crew, made up of illustrious strangers for many of whom this was their first filming experience.
One of the keys to success lies in this pleasing mystery, which spectators refrain from revealing to neophytes and which encourages converts to watch the film again at least a second time.
A giant cinephile complicity, in short.
Cinephile Horror
The communicative enthusiasm of the production is also due to its genesis.
Shot in eight days on a budget of approximately $27,000,
Don't Cut!
was directed by Shinichiro Ueda, 34, and his team with the help of Tokyo film school Enbu.
Screened only six days in an art house in November 2017, the film enjoyed a warm reception and was released in Japan after the festival season in June 2018. Released that summer in two cinemas, Shinichiro Ueda's film is invited to the programming of six additional cinemas, then about forty others, a hundred, two hundred.
And finally more than 350.
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This unexpected success puzzled many observers of the Japanese cinema industry who had not seen the film and its director coming.
At the origin of several short films since high school, Shinichiro Ueda had experienced a long slump until his 25th birthday and could never have hoped to be entrusted with a film by a major studio.
"The film was made precisely because we were all strangers
," Shinichiro Ueda told the Japanese daily
Asahi shinbun
in July 2018 .
The twelve actors selected during the auditions were all imperfect and without much experience, so I relied on their personality to blur the limits of their acting.
And I adapted the scenario to their personality.”
A way to model this real fake zombie movie in the image of its cast.
Michel Hazanavicius was not mistaken either.
“This pastiche of Z series was an ideal pretext to talk about people who make films
, the director confirmed to
20 Minutes
on Tuesday .
I don't really like zombie movies and horror movies aren't my favorite."
It remains to be seen whether this French adaptation with a more developed budget - 4 million euros -, with a better furnished poster - Romain Duris, Bérénice Béjo… - and with more tricolor humor will in turn manage to make the Croisette shiver.
Charm or horror.
