The Second Act

... but someone should have called a halt to this before it made it to release!

Along the lines of "let's get four or five REALLY good actors (and that idiot Garrel) and get them to play a very meta scenario intermingling "real life" and "the film", and make some elliptical comments about AI, filmmaking and the state of the world along the way." Shame it doesn't really work, and it's certainly not funny. I feel sorry for the Cannes audience who presumably had to pretend they liked it on the night.

I must say that I have really enjoyed some of Quentin's earlier films (such as Mandibles and Smoking Causes Coughing) so was quite ready for something weird and, frankly, if it wasn't him I would have bailed on this fairly early on. But ultimately this came across as one of those homework essays that you produced on a Sunday night when you didn't really feel like it, but had to hand *something* in on the Monday morning, even if it was rubbish and not ready.

Hopefully his next film will be a return to form.

We saw this at a film festival in Poland with a packed audience and had a blast. I've seen Deerskin from the same director, so I knew something strange was coming, and I wasn't disappointed. But apart from the surreal twists and breaking the 4th wall as another reviewer noted, the performances were just magnifique: Each cast member felt like they were at the top of their game, and the laughs just kept coming. In Poland a celebrated trait is "distans do siebie", not taking yourself too seriously, and this quality was in full effect - every character put on airs, every human defect was exposed -- and it was a blast from start to finish. I was familiar with Louis Garrel, Lea Seydoux, and Vincent London, but Raphael Quenard was a nice surprise.

Recommend!

Brilliant Quentin Dupieux makes fun of cinema (his own métier) as he did before with theatre in the excellent «Yannick». And he is lucky enough to have a superb cast to give life to five actors who are working in a film, who constantly move from fiction to reality again and again, and who create a quite faithful image of all the vices (above all) and virtues of the people who make films. For them and the audience it is a hilarious and frenetic comedy, in which the story they are filming intersect with the lives of the actors, seen in a three-level game: the role they play in the film, their life as actors within the film, and as professional actors in real life.

In short, a man (Louis Garrel) asks his best friend (Raphäel Quenard) for help in seducing a woman (Léa Seydoux) who is stalking him and for whom he has absolutely no feelings. To do so, the man brings his friend to the meeting he has with the woman at Le Deuxième Acte restaurant, without knowing that she has brought her father (Vincent Lindon) to introduce him as her future partner. The quartet is joined by the restaurant waiter, played by an extra (Manuel Guillot), who suffers a panic attack and cannot properly pour wine into their glasses without his hand stopping shaking. Between these situations and the reality of the actors inside and outside the film, the events flow. Lindon receives a call to act with Paul Thomas Anderson, the actor who plays the extra has similar self-esteem problems as his character, actors turn out to be the reverse of what they pretend to be. And so it naturally flows this irreverent comedy from one of the classic iconoclast filmmakers of world cinema. A very enjoyable film.

What a waste of energy, a waste of resources, a waste of time, a waste of talent. Everything crumbles under the weight of the writing which is so full of clichés one thinks this too is also part of the joke. It is a film within a film whose plot never takes off, whose originality wears thin 10 minutes into the film. It is thankfully 1 hour 20 minutes, an hour too long. I must be in the minority here as the film opened the Festival de Cannes this year. The Second Act was filmed in the course of a little over two weeks and I found myself wondering how, and why, it was chosen to open the film festival.

Quentin Dupieux's movie opening this year's Cannes is a movie about a movie about...a movie? This is all typical Dupieux, questioning our reality in clever ways, and I think everything comes together rather well here.

We follow two pairs of actors heading towards a meeting at a diner, with each breaking character and the fourth wall ever more often, generating layers of reality that are usually at odds with one another. Questions are asked overtly and implicitly: does anything matter, how do we construct our reality and what about a dash of almost present-day futurism?

And to top it all off, the movie ends on one of the more meta fourth wall breaks I've ever seen, a bit of a mind-scratcher that cleverly frames the syntax of movie-making.

I think the ultimate claim of LDA is that the one undeniable real thing is what we feel. Not in "feelings are facts" kind of way, but rather in the effect we can have on other people, whether seen on unseen, quantifiable or not. 7.