Latest production by prolific filmmaker Quentin Dupieux, “The Second Act” was chosen to open the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
“Keep dreaming, it’s better.” This sentence spoken by Louis Garrel with two extras could almost be that of Quentin Dupieux to the spectators who discover The second act in cinemas. Presented at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday evening, the prolific filmmaker’s latest feature film is a black comedy that tackles the world of cinema and the star system. Difficult to summarize as it is peppered with several successive twists, but the filmmaker plunges us behind the unglamorous backdrop of the seventh art by following actors, who play actors, who play in a film. You follow ?
A meta film (the important part of the film is precisely its second act) and a mise-en-abyme like Dupieux has accustomed the spectators to, which allows him to destroy the star system and warn about the state of current French cinema, when he has become its new muse and who questions, deep down, the capacity of cinema to make us dream, even today. So there are a lot of things in The second act and Quentin Dupieux leaves little down time for his viewer to digest it.
By superimposing the levels, and therefore the reading levels and blurring the border between cinema and reality, the director seeks to disconcert and plays on the spectator’s intelligence on the true subject of his film. While we believe we are in reality, we discover that we are in a fiction, which itself is a fiction imagined by a merciless AI, the real enemy of the cinema of tomorrow.
The real denunciation of the film (the dangers of AI, the capacity of cinema to make people dream, its cruelty…) are then truly revealed in this “second act”, after a first part which tackles the actors (their whims , their hypocrisy, their stupidity even) in a biting but artificial way, precisely. In front of Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel, Raphaël Quenard and Lea Seydoux who have a blast delivering scathing lines, Manuel Guillot embodies a more fragile character, removed from the environment, and therefore more authentic. He’s the real star of the film, as he says in the film’s mysterious trailer but which already told it all: “the real hero is me”.
Extremely satirical, scenes make one cringe and even shock (the actors of the first level multiply transphobic, homophobic, validist remarks under the stunned gaze of another who does not want to be associated with that, and an actress threatens another actor with the “cancel” after he tries to kiss her), but are to be observed from a new angle after an hour of film, when the whole is revealed in all its layers and we have, finally, discovered this second act. But while these subjects still remain very sensitive (and rightly so), these scenes remain awkward and would have benefited from more immediate clarity. As in the rest of the film, which by multiplying the subjects and points of view, can lose the viewer’s point, and that’s a shame. The second act is currently in cinemas.
Synopsis – Florence wants to introduce David, the man she is madly in love with, to her father Guillaume. But David is not attracted to Florence and wants to get rid of her by throwing her into the arms of his friend Willy. The four characters find themselves in a restaurant in the middle of nowhere.