About forty minutes before my screening of Coupez ! was scheduled to begin, a friend of mine texted me saying he had just been turned away from the Palais red carpet, and that a Cannes employee had informed him that an evening-wear dress code was in effect for the one remaining screening of the day. I received this message while lying on the beach, in khaki shorts and a black T-shirt, about a ten-minute walk east of the Palais. So I booked it back to our apartment (a ten-minute walk west of the Palais), only returning to the theater within a few minutes of the movie’s start time, covered in sweat and holding my too-loose pants up with both hands as I walked up the empty red carpet.
I shouldn’t have run.
Coupez !, a purported comedy, doesn’t find almost any humor until its last twenty minutes. The first act is particularly cringeworthy and its moments of attempted levity often feel too effortful to be funny. More than ten people walked out within the first thirty minutes – one of them exclaiming ‘Terriblé!” loud enough for the whole theater to hear – and I’m surprised that number wasn’t higher. The set-up is this: a film crew is shooting a zombie movie and the director, unhappy with his actors’ performances and fearing another career flop, decides to resurrect real zombies to unleash on them. Anyone who has seen Coupez !’s source material, a 2017 Japanese hit One Cut of the Dead, will find that despite being a very faithful remake, this version bungles what made One Cut charming.
The actors in this version seem less nice across the board. Even the unhinged director, given some pathos in the original by a longer conversation about his debt, seems more cruel than desperate here. The lead actress of Coupez ! seems less earnest and exhausted in her attempts to please the director, and her love interest, renamed Bang (they squeeze more bad jokes out of this than you’d think), is sapped of all the original’s boyish charm. Everyone seems more serious, while director Michel Hazanivicius seems doubly committed to making this remake more complex and more biting in its satire. Bang now pauses in the middle of a zombie chase to deliver a monologue on the metaphorical significance of the zombie in a globalized world. Why do this? The effects are bloodier, the chases are longer, the blunders are more obvious, and the result feels less like a loving imitation of a B-movie than an outright attack against them.
This works against Coupez ! in its second and third acts, which twist the movie on its head to show us the pre-production process leading up to the filming of the movie, and the ensuing mishaps and coincidences that made the first thirty minutes we watched so cheesy. The movie becomes more about the difficulties of parenting and creative collaboration, and while still not very funny, the scenes here are significantly less painful to watch. The end of the movie brought one genuine chuckle out of me, but otherwise bored me up to its final triumphant shot.
It is ironic to me that Cannes chose this movie to open the festival. One of Coupez !’s unique differences from One Cut of the Dead is its self-awareness of its status as a remake. There is one scene in the second half of Coupez ! when the director insists on certain changes to the original script, saying there’s a difficulty in turning a “Japanese” zombie movie into a “French” zombie movie. French humor may be too different, he worries, and the story may be too uniquely Japanese to be reinterpreted by another country. This idea in theory sounds nonsensical to me, but Coupez ! accidentally proves it right. The French version seems unable to capture any of what made the Japanese version work.