Set in the year 2019, An Unfinished Film is a fictional documentary about a film crew that reunites to finish a queer feature from 10 years ago. There are many reasons not to revive the project, as the film’s former lead Jiang Chen (Qin Hao) points out. An arthouse queer romance is neither commercially viable nor even possible within the ambit of Chinese censorship. Nonetheless, the crew feels bound by a sense of obligation: a duty to relieve their queer characters with an ending once and for all.
Although An Unfinished Film is a convincing fiction packaged as a non-fiction, it has plenty of allusions to the real. In 2009, Lou Ye released Spring Fever, a queer romance also starring Qin Hao. The film was a radical creation not only because it spotlit homoerotic desire — which was hitherto taboo in China — but also since it was produced during Lou Ye’s official banishment from cinema, as imposed by China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television. With this interweaving of real and unreal, past and present, there’s a sense of time out of joint in An Unfinished Film: as if it were gestated in an alternate timeline where Spring Fever never manifested.
Once the crew is assembled, they dive straight into production. We get a privileged look behind-the-scenes; the night before the final shoot, the cast is seen frantically making last-minute preparations in a hotel. Through a shaky camera, we follow different characters — a P.A handing out call sheets, the film’s director, and Jiang Chen — as they assemble for the hypothetical next day. But the imagined ‘tomorrow’ never arrives. Amidst the behind-the-scenes clamor, news of Covid shutdowns begin to circulate, causing essential crew members to pack up and leave. Soon, the entire hotel is put on zero-Covid lockdown and the remaining cast is forcefully confined to their rooms. Just as the film-within-a-film is about to finish, it unravels.
The rest of the drama showcases how the crew adjusts in quarantine. Typical of a Covid film, An Unfinished Film formally shifts to incorporate the Internet to represent the “new normal.” Split screens and screen recordings show how characters adjust to their isolation; expressions of love and uncertainty of the future are texted, not quietly whispered, on Wechat; drinking with friends is mediated through boisterous video calls; Qin Hao connects with his newborn daughter through silly photos and vlogs. Ironically, the unknowable Internet becomes the site for personal intimacy. In addition to the private, the film also shows how China’s public discourse was reshaped during the pandemic. Peppered throughout the film are references to media that defined national forums, from popular memes — such as Douyin famous dances — to politically potent videos showing the Urumqi apartment fire in Xinjiang: an incident that catalyzed a series of protests demanding an end to the lockdown.
There’s a feeling of tension and civil unrest throughout the film. During the start of lockdown, for example, Qin Hao attempts to escape the hotel, but is caught and dragged back to his room; during this scuffle, fists are thrown, and the lead actor is left bleeding. This sentiment crescendos at the film’s penultimate sequence; through montage editing, the crew is seen being attacked by the police for leaving their rooms for a New Years’ party. Lou Ye is a director drawn to dissent and protest, despite operating in a production system hostile toward it. Although formed out of necessity, his dual consciousness is precisely what makes his work interesting: rather than explicitly addressing Chinese politics, he uses metonyms and metaphors as a vehicle for critique. In that sense, An Unfinished Film feels the most direct out of his oeuvre. It’s abundantly clear that he thinks of China’s zero-Covid policy as a moment of oppression and confinement.
Some of Lou Ye’s liberal aspersions of the state ring true. His insistence on individual freedom and political expression, for example, are understandable in works such as Suzhou River (2000) — which criticized the rapid deterritorialization of China — and Summer Palace (2006) — which bravely addressed the Tiananmen massacre: a terrible blight on the Communist Party’s record. However, in the context of Covid, Lou Ye’s position feels untenable. It is unfair to frame lockdown as apocalyptic — tonally and formally — when it saved the lives of millions of people in China, a population with one of the fastest growing aging populations in the world. An astute Covid film finds ways to express the individual hardships faced during the pandemic, while also being mindful that the precaution was rooted in collective care: An Unfinished Film certainly fails on this front.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 4.
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