On the absurdity of contemporary art-house cinema

Quentin Dupieux He is the odd sock of French cinema. His films are unlike any other, and often don't even resemble each other. The second act, for example, could rhyme with Yannick, the film he made in 2023 about a spectator who intervenes in a play and the dynamite, a clever prank on a representation of reality, ehem, interruptus. This time, the fiction would be the filming of a sequence of a movie in which the actors (and what actors! Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel and Raphaël Quenard, the cream of French cinema) enter and leave the story, blurring the boundaries between lies and truth.

In a metalinguistic puff pastry perhaps with too many layers for us to know who is who and what their real emotions and motivations are (although the film already plays with this convoluted confusion), The second act At times it seems like a joke about Plato's myth of the cave; or about those characters who were clueless about their authors' intentions, who appeared in works by Pirandello or Unamuno. Although its light nature and its non-lethal poison make the film at other times closer to a science fiction version ofDinner for Idiots. Let's leave it at a middle ground: it seems like a Frenchified chapter of the always disconcerting and at the same time stimulating series The essays by Nathan Fielder.

In the end, look, this time a Dupieux film is less free verse than usual. Less successful and crazy than Rubber, Jaws either Smoking causes coughing, The second act It's worth it, however, to laugh at the jokes the film includes about the current state of cinema: films made entirely by AI, actors bordering on cancellation with every word they say, and art-house films being shot... in the middle of nowhere, right where Quentin Dupieux knows perfectly well that his kind of cinema lives.