Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Quentin Dupieux
Starring: Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel, Raphaël Quenard, Manuel Guillot
Quentin Dupieux's recent successful prolific run of absurdist
comedies shows signs of stalling with The Second Act. Even Dupieux's best films give you the sense that they're stretching
a gag to breaking point by the time the end credits begin to unspool,
but that point occurs much earlier here. As you would expect, Dupieux
has once again come up with an arresting premise, but the French auteur
takes what might have been a winning formula for a comedy of manners and
derails it with the sort of meta elements that no longer feel fresh in
2024.
The setup is a doozy. David (Louis Garrel) is dating the
beautiful Florence (Léa Seydoux), but having grown tired of her
clinginess, he has devised a plan to palm her off on his friend Willy
(Raphaël Quenard). Unlike the sophisticated and urbane David,
Willy is immature and prone to dropping the sort of politically
incorrect zingers you might expect from your "woke" obsessed uncle. It
seems unlikely that Florence would be won over by Willy's birdbrained
ways but David has his mind set on the plan, which involves bringing
Willy to a dinner date he has arranged with Florence. What David doesn't
realise is that Florence has brought her father, Guillaume (Vincent Lindon), along to introduce him to her lover.
That setup seems like a comic goldmine but nothing actually gets
extracted from it, as well before we get to the actual dinner it's
revealed that all four protagonists are merely actors playing the roles
of the participants in the above scenario. They spend most of the movie
breaking character, often to bemoan the current state of filmmaking or
to engage in petty jealousies. Dupieux seems to take a fiendish delight
in how close to the bone some of the dialogue is, as though he's trying
to provoke his very cast members. Seydoux's Florence is mocked for
"stripping off for indie films." The veteran Lindon is forced to play an
insecure aging actor ruffled by the presence of rising star Willy,
played by Quenard, an actor who came out of nowhere to explode onto
French screens with the 2023 hit Junkyard Dog. Implications of being a closeted gay man are levelled at Garrel's
David (the actor once controversially suggested that "maybe one day" he
would turn gay).
Dupieux's meta-commentary on the insecure and egotistical nature of
actors comes off as reductive and dated. There's nothing offered here
that we haven't seen in countless other industry satires, with the four
leads essentially reduced to backstabbing, vain archetypes. But what
keeps us engaged as Dupieux stretches this thin concept to a merciful 80
minutes is the undeniable joy of seeing four of France's top stars sat
around a table trading barbs. Following his breakout turn in Dupieux's
recent Yannick, Quenard once again plays the role of an ignorant everyman
dropped into the precious world of artists, and the young actor is
mesmeric, his gangly, nervous energy reminiscent of a young Eric
Roberts.
We're told that the film within the film is the first feature to be
directed solely by AI, represented by an avatar on a laptop screen. Any
suggestions the actors make are met with a pre-programmed response of
"Your opinion will not be taken into account." The actors shrug it off
with a resignation that this is just how things are now, but Dupieux
makes it clear that he's not going to be replaced by the machines
without a fight. Shot at a disused aerodrome whose runway stands in for
a deserted country road, The Second Act boasts what is purportedly the longest tracking shot in cinema
history, in the traditional sense of the camera running along tracks
laid on the ground. And just in case we find such a claim dubious,
Dupieux closes his film with a tracking shot that reveals the length of
the very tracks its running upon, stretching far into the horizon. It's
a reminder of how much human labour goes into filmmaking, and a giant
middle finger to those who think AI represents the future of the
craft.
The Second Act is on UK/ROI
VOD from December 2nd.
