The Cannes Film Festival opens on Tuesday night, May 17th, with the film “Cut!” Zombie film directed by Michel Hazanavicius.
We expected the arrival of Hollywood stars, Tom Cruise with Top Gun Maverick or why not Tom Hanks with Elvis opening tonight for the 75th Cannes Film Festival.
It was all wrong. It is, in fact, a very French production that Thierry Främax, general delegate of the event, finally chose: cut! The Great Hall of the Post-Covid Festival.
Foundry
The director of the first two episodes of OSS 117 will be on the red carpet from 7 pm, alongside Bérénice Bejo (his partner and mother of children Lucienne and Gloria), Romain Duris, Gregory Jadebois, Finnegan Oldfield, Jean-Pascal Zade and Japanese actress Yoshiko Taihara. Any Coupez team! that we can discover at the same time that it was shown in Cannes in more than 400 cinemas.
Michel Hazanavicius, artist author Oscar for Best Director in 2012, while Jean Dujardin won the Oscar for Best Actor, empty-handed from his last residency on La Croisette in 2017 with Le Redoutable. This passionate love story between Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Wizemski was not unanimous among festival-goers at the time. As is The Search, set in 2014 against the backdrop of the war in Chechnya and a huge box-office failure.
Greetings To The Cinema
Brave, the director returned to Cannes after five years with yet another feature film set in the world of cinema. “It’s great to be at the festival this year in a coupé!” says Michel Hazanavicius.
Polite! For whom Michel Hazanavicius also wrote the script while in prison, it is a remake of the Japanese film One Cut of The Dead, by Shinichiro Ueda (currently viewable on the SVOD platform, formerly FilmoTV), with two consecutive takes of more than 30 minutes.
Address Change
Hazanavicius who changed the title of his film, originally titled Z (as Z), at risk of confusion with the letter Z that appears on Russian armored vehicles in Ukraine, plunges us into a zombie film, somewhere in a far-fetched abandoned building we imagine in a Paris region. Disastrous atmosphere on set.
From the panicked technicians to the performers who become overwhelmed with the action, especially when the plot jumps with an on-set cut of actual living dead, the gunplay ends up getting dangerously close. But the viewer does not run out of surprises in this film that works like a drawer with a double bottom.
It’s all the imagination, the originality of the script that goes crazy in all directions to surprise us and make us laugh a lot. And this despite the liters of hemoglobin. Its interpreters, starting with the extraordinary Romain Duris, are in tune with the genre that the director pays homage to in passing. These zombie movies are often ridiculed by critics, but they attract audiences.
With Cut!, Hazanavicius offers us a somewhat sophisticated comedy, mainly thanks to the improbable situations and the dialogues that hit the target. Furthermore, it is a beautiful declaration of love for cinema and careers in the seventh art. Hats off to the artist! …
