Leading Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye’s cinema has been marked by a distinct air of mystery and intrigue. He has been dealing with themes of human frailties, desires, obsessions, intense passion, crime, systemic corruption, and troubled political history. The twin taboo topics of sexuality and politics have often found him on the wrong side of the establishment. He faced a five-year ban from making movies in 2006 after the release of Summer Palace, set against the backdrop of the Tiananmen Square events. In contrast, his recent work, An Unfinished Film, is an unusually personal, emotional film that aligns the ordeals of filmmaking with the trauma faced by humanity at large during the pandemic.

A docu-fiction set in January 2020, An Unfinished Film is about a film crew stumbling upon the footage of a queer movie that had come to a halt a decade ago. They reunite in Wuhan to resume the shoot and go on to deal with the unanticipated challenges that get thrown their way as COVID strikes and lockdown suddenly gets imposed across the country.

There’s a lot that’s self-reflexive about the film—the behind-the-scenes footage of Lou Ye’s own films used within the film for that matter. Or the chatter about indie filmmaking which feels a tad contrived and obvious with some banal lines like—“Are we making the film for our own entertainment?” Or the spectre of censorship for that matter.

However, what’s interesting is dealing with COVID through the lens of filmmaking. Or rather, providing a glimpse of how the pandemic affected an artistic enterprise and a big industry that’s already burdened with uncertainties of its own, where passion projects often die a sudden death or can sometimes take a lifetime to find fruition. The central conceit—of reviving a film after a decade—is fascinating but also fanciful. How would a long interregnum have come to bear on the revived business of making it? Is it possible to pick up the pieces after so long? Or do you need to start from scratch? Can a subject—same-sex love story—from a decade back, still be relevant? And what of the original cast? Would the actors still fit those parts? As one of them states, he was single then but is married and has a family and responsibilities now that determine his choice of work. The film may not quite satisfactorily answer some fundamental questions but anyhow sets the viewer thinking about them and engages with the ifs and buts of the situation.

In all this, the aspect of temporality that gets willy-nilly woven into the film turns out quite captivating and beguiling. There’s the wait of ten years on the one hand and the seeming eternity of the lockdown on the other. Ironically, even the “second chance” can’t escape the doomed destiny of the original project. There are dualities at play, starting with the hybrid form of the film itself, which marries the real with the fictional. Within it, Lou Ye explores ideas like the imagined and the truth, the nostalgic and the actual, fragmentary and the complete or the whole, the lived and the enacted, and all that lies in between these polarities.

From the onset of filmmaking to the outbreak of COVID in the latter bits, there’s a definite shift in tone in the film that feels jarring at times. However, it’s the ominous build-up to the lockdown that has the characteristic urgency, tension, and suspense associated with Lou Ye’s cinema. It is the part that is gripping, involving as well as emotionally exhausting—that feeling of being trapped, of seeing the world through our mobile, laptop or TV screens comes rushing back again. At the end of the day, An Unfinished Film will be best remembered as a film about the revival of a film that unwittingly makes the audience relive the painful memories of the pandemic lying somnolent but extant within each of us.