An “incomplete movie” puts the epidemic in the spotlight

the Corona virus disease-19 Pandemic has proven to be bad for films as it was for cinematic theaters. A few films facing the head of the epidemic have lit the experience, and the most permanent Corona virus disease The film has so far been jewelry: Nicole Kidman’s promotional trailer for AMC theaters, which was released in 2021 to revive the enthusiasm for cinema once theaters reopen. Now, the Chinese director Le Yi, with his latest feature, “Infinite movie”, took the Kidman trailer a root step forward: where the AMC announces the influence of the epidemic on cinema works, Lou’s Film. Corona virus diseaseImpact on filmmaking itself.

“Infinitive movie”, at one level, a historical drama, viewing the arrival and spread of the virus in China to monitor its impact on the lives of ordinary people – including that participation in the extraordinary activity of filmmaking. The procedure begins in July 2019, and it revolves around an incomplete movie by a director -based director called Xiaori ten years ago and now hopes to end. But Lu movie is also a mixture of imagination and stories. For beginners, director Xiaorui plays the role of Mao Xiaorui, the same as a way out, and expands the dramatic story by including actual shots of life during the epidemic. More surprising, the incomplete film inside the film consists of already existing shots that if it was a decade or more, and a “incomplete film” plot includes fictional characters from the previous Lu Lu. In fact, Lu-who wrote the text program with his wife and participating long ago, MA Yingli, who is also an exit-in the treaty of all the shots found, both fictional and imaginative stories, as an equal archive, equally in history. The intensification of imagination and stories in the past and present has an impact that shakes a fundamental stability that is inseparable from the boldness of if the political vision.

At the beginning of the film, the footage is held from the incomplete movie inside a movie on an old computer. After Xiaorui assistants make the computer work and save the shots, Xiaorui calls one of the main actors, Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao), to watch with him. (Chen also played the main character, also called Jiang, in the movie “Lou” Spring Fever “, from 2009, and footage of this filming is included here.) After they watched, Xiaorui asks Jiang to join him and other crew members to finish the movie. The plan is to shoot in a southern city, and after ten years it picks up the same character, which is now participating in the area of ​​real estate in the region. The main complications are that, a decade ago, Jiang was a young man and unknown, over time on his hands, while now a professional actor, in demand a lot, and finds it difficult to schedule the shooting at the time of the shooting. Moreover, he is married and his wife expects their first child, scheduled for December. However, it reluctantly agrees to join Xiaorui, the rest of the staff and crew for the new shooting in late January 2020.

You can guess a lot of the rest: with the spread of rumors about a new viral infection in Wuhan, near the photography site, a crew gets a disease, and becomes a “incomplete movie” tense excitement, and a experimental narration to employ the base for the population from rumors and concerns to the total transformation of daily life and Chinese society in general. With the spread of Lockdowns quickly throughout the country, not only the quarantine of the actors’ hotel and crew in their hotel, but they are also isolated in their rooms, prevented from assembly and even from entering the corridors. Their foods and any other necessities are brought to the doors of their rooms by workers in Hazmat suits, and security personnel are ready to apply it – in an author, if necessary – involuntary solitary confinement. The group drama wanders around Jiang, who sang her wife, she sang Qi XI, at her home at her home with a newborn girl. In the spacious video calls, Jiang appears and tells her about the spread of infection, the spread of ambulances, and the conditions they bear; With his phone, he records things he sees from his room at the hotel – including a woman crying in an alley behind the hotel while a ambulance takes her mother’s body.

By working as a film director in China and constantly negotiating the control system, Lu-who reached sixty this month and began making films in the early 1990s-was always a kind of cinematic forms. His films do much more than they indicate their oceans, as they opened secrecy gates in banned areas through hints and omissions, and Ricoitss ridicule and clear silence. For example, the amazing “suzhou river” drama, since 2000, has become a semi-documentary report on the corruption of the police and the world’s violence, from an unknown personal point of view, a video photographer-a cinematic who does not dare to reveal his name. If he paid the limits of literal and public expression in China with its 2006 historical drama, the “Summer Palace”, against the background of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and when it was shown without permission from censorship, it was officially prevented from making films in China for five years. During the embargo, he made a secret “Spring Fever”-which was made by Jiang-who was one of the first modern Chinese films that explicitly depict homosexuality. In this film, Jiang was a gay man, and he also depicts a gay man in shots to appear; Jiang now expresses doubts that the film, which is completed once it is completed, will pass with the most stringent censorship now. (To add another layer of self -reference, Jiang’s wife sang the character of Jiang, as she played by Qi, in the past in the movie Lou’s 2012, “MyS spent”, who also participated in the Chen Star.)

The common arc is common: one of the indisputable routines for daily life to the strange new natural represented in risks, precautions, fears, restrictions, disease and deaths; From there to ultimately a cautious comfort. However, everything is decisive in an “incomplete movie” like his public story is its mysterious transformations between imagination and stories, which is the gap of the howl between the past and the present. The film was silent and escaped from noisy warnings: Do not believe what you see; Suppose that what is presented as a fact may be a manufacturing like what is presented as an imagination; She realizes that what is presented as an imagination may hide the facts more terrifying than it can appear. Sometimes, there are hints about where you aim to doubt, as is the case when a realistic article, Lee Winyang, appears, his early warning about Corona virus disease He officially obtained it as a rumor owner, who-as another clip-explains the virus in February 2020. The film does not show that his death led to the influx of online protest, exhausted on his silence and demands freedom of expression. Flash point of intense opposition in which an “incomplete movie” shows a fire in a residential building in Oroming, Xinjiang, in 2022, which led to deaths that many believe is the result of strict closure policies. Footage shows if to archive if both fire and violent protests that followed.

“Infinitely Film” contains some similarities with the latest previous Lou, which is the fictional historical excitement “Saturday Form”, from 2019. This film was the Robin Robin tour of espionage and treason, in 1941, in the artistic world of such, made of such, is about to vote, about to vote, about voting, alike. Wipe, portray Glossile. In the movie “Infinite Film”, it is subject Corona virus diseaseProtocols associated with similar treatment. In the Lu vision, the continuous closure-the security forces everywhere and harassment, examining the intrusive identity and temperature readings, collecting spreading information-explodes as a symbol of the monitoring and control system and the intensification of this system unabated.

It goes without saying that many Americans are also thinking Corona virus diseaseThe restrictions associated with being repressive and entering. Here, of course, there was no repression of their protest, nor a political obstacle to the general debate, yet there was a set of denial, deviations, confusion and explicit lies issued by the Trump administration. (Anyone who tries to inject this whitening? Corona virus disease The era, which rises to its massive political, personal and historical crises. Lu notes, by seeking filmmaking in the spiral of the Atini catastrophe, that his own film is incomplete, just a beginning, just part of the great work required of filmmakers counting for sadness, loss, breakdowns, and manipulation in this new grave. “We come to this place for magic,” Kidman tells us at the AMC stadium, even if he has art and boldness to reveal the light hand on which this magic depends. In the theater, as Kidman says, “The stories feel perfect and strong.” It separates if the perfection crust is the narration, in order to show where the authority lies. ♦