The cream of French cinema send up the industry and the emergence of A.I. in a self-reflexive absurdist comedy from Quentin Dupieux, whose work Film Brain thinks probably isn't for him.
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00:00The fourth wall gets absolutely annihilated in the second act, an absurdist comedy from
00:05prolific French director Quentin Dupieux that opened last year's Cannes Film Festival.
00:09Léa Seydoux, Vincent Linden, Louis Gorelli and Raphael Cunard play a group of actors
00:14who are filming at a restaurant, the titular second act.
00:17They're making a rom-com written and directed by an AI and reality and fiction soon become
00:22extremely blurred.
00:23Dupieux is probably best known for the killer tire movie Rubber and I've seen that and
00:28smoking causes coughing and I think it's pretty safe to say at this point that his
00:31films are just not for me, it's not his fault, it's mine.
00:37Or maybe it isn't.
00:38The movie's central joke is taking the idea of fiction is reality and reality is fiction
00:43and taking it to the utmost extreme.
00:46The cast alternates seamlessly between the deliberately asinine dialogue they're saying
00:49in the scene that they're filming to arguing among themselves, but even during that they're
00:54aware that they're in a film and directly address the camera and the crew.
00:58Some of the biggest names in French cinema are enjoying sending themselves up and there's
01:02a bit of commentary on self-important actors, technology interfering with art and so on
01:07and sometimes it's a bit amusing but it's so packed with layer upon layer upon layer
01:13of ironic detachment that the satire doesn't land because really there's nothing underneath it.
01:19The worst of this is all the tiresome stuff about cancelled culture, all the characters
01:24going oh don't do this, don't say that, you'll get cancelled.
01:28It mostly seems like an excuse for characters to say offensive things for laughs but also
01:32calling attention to that and contradicting itself because it's a film within a film
01:36within a film within a film.
01:38It's hard to tell if it's a critique or deflecting criticism because everything is meaningless,
01:43nothing is real and nobody commits to saying anything.
01:47Even at just 80 minutes I found this to be smug and self-indulgent in a way that tested
01:51my patience because this is a sketch comedy idea at best.
01:55If there's anything knowable about the film it's the extended tracking shots with the
01:59first 20 minutes of the film dominated by walking talks in long unbroken takes.
02:04It's fitting that the final shot of the film is a several minute ride along a camera dolly
02:08track which is the most meta thing in a hyper meta film but probably the only thing in it that's real.