Yannick: La rivincita dello spettatore

At 67 minutes length Dupieux's comedy of manners never gets a chance to outstay its welcome. Despite some of the anti-audience sentiments displayed in his cult classic "Rubber" (2010), about a murderous car tyre (I can't believe I just typed those words), we do find him looking after his audience here.

Yannick is a security guard from the burbs who takes a valuable night off to go see a play in central Paris. When he realizes that the play is a piece of sullen middle class scatology, he flips his lid and takes the theatre hostage. I was drawn briefly to wonder what he was expecting from a play called "The Cuckold", it appears in his extreme naivete that he might have been expecting to see some sort of slapstick take on infidelity. I do not think he was a frequent flyer at this particular establishment. In my youth I worked night and weekend shifts, and it is indeed very difficult to have a social life and see the various curiosities and entertainments on offer, not just because of timetabling but also lack of disposal income. So, despite his felonious actions, it is fairly easy to feel sympathetic to Yannick.

Yannick is somewhat of an uneducated rube who would typically lose an argument, even if he was right. At gun point people are forced to be somewhat more open and are less able to scoff or run rings round him than they might otherwise be. The audience and players find it difficult to dodge his suddenly quite wide ranging critiques, which go beyond simply the quality of the play and contain some sort of Marxist-adjacent home-baked philosophizing. One of the traits of his prior movie "Incredible But True" that I really enjoyed was that Dupieux knows (most filmmakers don't know anything about office culture), that many office laptop jockeys spend an inordinate amount of time mucking about. Here an audience member is forced to reveal an embarrassing sexualized password and has a saucy desktop wallpaper, maybe he missed the sexual harassment training at work? Maybe one day labourers work out that many "wfh" bureaucrats are clocked off, slippers off, and perfecting the art of espresso making, on multiples of labourer salary. This kind of class dynamic is something that Yannick is close to unravelling, and he is doing so whilst holding a gun.

The movie is a midly chilling chiselling away at the cosmetics of contemporary culture amongst the liberal middle classes. Lift up a log and all sorts of creepy crawlies are underneath. Yannick creates the type of play he would like to see and it's actually quite moving to see him weep as something he has created is enacted. It's a movie that questions one's assumptions and the status quo, it's bright and breezy and well worth your time.