Review: The Second Act

Director:  Quentin Dupieux

Stars:  Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel

Perennial class clown and prolific cinematic prankster Quentin Dupieux has a scatological hit ratio, but an impressive work ethic. He’s churning out a feature every year at present, throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. In recent years we’ve had Deerskin, Smoking Causes Coughing, Incredible But True and last year’s short but sharp Yannick. His latest, The Second Act, boasts an incredible cast and had the privilege of opening last year’s Cannes Film Festival… though it was greeted with a somewhat muted reception.

Landing now on MUBI in the UK that response seems understandable. Almost from the off Dupieux reminds us who we’re dealing with. Friends Willy (Yannick layover Raphaël Quenard) and David (Luis Garrel) are walking through some anonymous wintery French rural landscape. When Willy makes off-the-cuff intolerant comments regarding trans people, David scolds him, reminding him that they’re being filmed. Dupieux enjoys playing devil’s advocate with cultural taboos, especially surrounding political correctness and socially conscious censorship, and so he indulges himself once more, here, right off the bat. One senses that he’s broadly on David’s side of the argument, but he does enjoy giving motormouths like Willy a prickly diatribe, and Quenard is his go-to-guy for this.

The real topic of their conversation is Florence (Léa Seydoux!), the woman David is currently seeing whose beauty evidently intimidates him so much he can’t conceive sleeping with her. The appropriately-named Willy’s role, therefore, is to intercede on his behalf. They’re on their way to meet her at the modest café that gives the film it’s name. Little do they know that Florence has brought her father Guillaume (Vincent Lindon!) to meet her new beau.

In a mirror of the opening conversation, Florence and Guillaume break character for a more pertinent and interesting debate, questioning the importance of art in the face of global cataclysm. Furthering the sense of Brechtian deconstruction, Lindon even calls off-screen for his lines. A staged gag reel moment as Dupieux keeps on rolling. A further dramatic detour in which ‘Lindon’ is offered a role in the next Paul Thomas Anderson movie is fun enough, but only expands on ground already covered.

The foursome meet and the interruptions to the mise en scène perpetuate. The upshot is the realisation that Dupieux isn’t at all interested in his own little micro-drama (a paranoia already vocalised by Lindon). If Dupieux doesn’t have the requisite skin in the game for his story, why should we? It’s a serious question that prompts the answer that the interaction of his core characters isn’t really the point, and that the meat of The Second Act is really the growing number of interlude skits where Seydoux, Lindon, Garrel and Quenard comment metatextually on their roles as actors.

As things progress some of Dupieux’s targets – and his success at hitting them – get messier. A bathroom scene between Seydoux and Quenard stumbles around the subject of consent between actors, highlighting through absence the benefit of on-set intimacy co-ordinators. AI and digital augmentation get their time in the firing line. By the time hesitant actor Stéphane (Manuel Guillot) bumbles in as the quartet’s nervous wine-spilling waiter, the farce is running thin. Once a dramatic violent act confuses the boundaries of the text further, patience is, frankly, at an end.

One can appreciate the appeal of this text for the actors, the flex of ducking in and out of character – or, more accurately, from one character to another – at a moment’s notice has the energy of a great acting exercise. Unfortunately, that’s what The Second Act also feels like. All four main players show they are adept at this kind of faux-improvisation, and its always wonderful to watch the likes of Seydoux and Lindon in anything. But there’s no getting away from how small, indulgent and trivial The Second Act feels. A sketch allowed to run for 80 minutes with little in the way of payoff. In spite of one of Dupieux’s most impressive ensembles yet, it amounts to very little but a run-on daydream.