THE SECOND ACT © Chi-Fou-Mi / Arte France Cinéma
Le Deuxième Acte (The Second Act), Quentin Dupieux’s new comic mise en abyme
In thirteen films, Quentin Dupieux has made the absurd a genre unto itself. The unclassifiable and prolific French director is opening the 77th Festival de Cannes Out of Competition with Le Deuxième acte (The Second Act), a new comedy that is a mirror effect of cinema, promising an edition focused on the essence of film.
Just this once, Quentin Dupieux has deliberately chosen to keep quiet and not say anything about his thirteenth feature film beyond the briefest of summaries, in keeping with the way that he’s been catching us off guard since his beginnings seventeen years ago. A way, perhaps, for this filmmaker with his staggering vitality to remind us that his ability to quickly move from project to project has not at all thwarted his desire to move forward in a way that’s free from conventions.
“Florence wants to introduce David, the man she is wildly in love with, to her fatherGuillaume. But David isn’t attracted to Florence and wants to get rid of her by throwing her into the arms of his friend Willy.” For the moment, film lovers have to make do with this succinct pitch introducing the latest feature film from the director who got his start in electronic music and has since asserted himself in the global film scene as a self-taught filmmaker thanks to his outlandish buddy movies full of surrealist gags and dark humour.
Two years after Fumer fait Tousser (Smoking Causes Coughing), screened Out of Competition, but above all Yannick and Daaaaaali!,his two most recent films which came out in theatres within seven months of each other, the director is continuing straight ahead on his project of putting artistic creation in a mise en abyme in a skilfull and exuberant mirror effect between the conscious and the unconscious.
After the highly codified huis clos of a theatre show and the lair of an artist both eccentric and extravagant, Quentin Dupieux has taken his main characters, four actors played by Léa Seydoux,, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel and (inevitably) Raphaël Quenard to the middle of nowhere, in a restaurant with old-fashioned decor, to act out a scene from a third-rate movie being shot.
The director, who ordinarily enjoys scrutinising the relationships of couples and the torments of single life in his burlesque cinema, here offers his imperfect and clumsy characters the chance to come face to face with their cinematic doubles and their lines in a comedy that is also socially profound.
