CAnzu can do worse than choose a comedy for its opening gala, but the festival got off to an affable and fun start. Quentin Dupieux brings a touch of whimsy to your stream in this hilarious, mischievous, unapologetically goofy, fourth-wall-attacking sketch. It’s a perky meta gag, a movie about movies, or maybe just a movie about movies, the gist of which is that the reality we experience inside and outside of the movie theater is It is about claiming to be single. Despite the level of deception and role-playing we brought. It’s all just one part of a continuous experience that Dupieux ultimately shows us, like an endless dolly track (a temporary rail that allows the camera to move smoothly).
Laugh lines abound, but the second act would have been a little thin if it weren’t for the rich, creamy thickness of the alpha-grade French actor. The film follows a nervous and unhappy man called Stéphane (Manuel Guillot) who opens a restaurant in the middle of nowhere, arrogantly called “Second Act”. Two young men are seen walking towards the restaurant. David (Louis Garrel) and his friend Willy (Raphael Cunard from Dupieux’s previous film Yannick). David ends up going on a date with a beautiful woman there, but he doesn’t like her clinginess and neediness, so he brings Willie to seduce her and get her hands off him. This woman, Florence (Léa Seydoux), was preparing to meet David, unaware of David’s plan to trick her into someone else, and it was actually David who brought her father. I’m sure Guillaume plays it. Vincent Lindon.
The actors playing these roles keep going out of character and bickering with each other, even though none of them say “cut!” The action moves seamlessly in and out of fiction and apparent levels of reality. This is likely a result of the AI, a novel way in which it appears to be directed by a robotic voice from an avatar on the laptop held up by the lower runner.
Dupieux playfully pokes fun at the film industry’s progressive scruples. Certain characters appear to be homophobic and transphobic, but the film lets us know that’s just an illusion. Or is it? Act 2 even takes the mickey out of the #MeToo movement, which the industry actually takes very seriously, on tentative and inauthentic grounds. Still, Dupieux also includes many gags about sad losers taking their own lives with guns. Now, some may find this as offensive and controversial as the rest, but it’s presented as something entirely different from a self-conscious joke about stupid liberal wokeness.
The second act is a strange movie in a way. Despite its knowledge and artistic demeanor, the film is strangely unsophisticated and undemanding, compared to Dupieux’s previous comedies such as Smoking Makes You Cough and The Incredibles But True. less demanding than etc. There’s no real tension or revelation in the contradictions between truth and falsehood, and the actors don’t really play with the likes of Garrel and Seydoux, as they do in Larry David’s episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, for example. It is not expected that there will be. Still, Guillaume is overjoyed to receive a job offer from a real-life director named Paul Thomas Anderson. Louis meme.
The running comic theme of Act Two is that there’s something fundamentally very silly about acting in movies. Pretending to be made-up people in made-up stories when important events are happening in the world that require adults to do their jobs properly. Florence’s mother is a surgeon and frankly unimpressed with her daughter’s career, but the musicians on the Titanic continued to play to calm and console the passengers as the ship sank. Similarly, Florence is convinced that acting’s work is legitimate. . Guillaume scornfully laughs and says that this is just an urban legend, a fiction made up by James Cameron, and that only naive fools would believe it. This is a funny prank by Dupieux, designed to get people to Google the Titanic musicians after the movie is over. There’s probably not much going on in “Act Two,” but the soufflé of self-consciousness springs up deliciously enough.
