The Second Act (2024)

"Frequently Very Funny Indeed"

The latest comedy from quirky French writer-director Quentin Dupieux, and the film that opened the Cannes Film Festival this year, get a digital release from Signature Entertainment.

David (Louis Garrel from Bertolucci's THE DREAMERS) is being hounded by Florence (Léa Seydoux from lots of things including Cronenberg's CRIMES OF THE FUTURE and Bertrand Bonello's THE BEAST) who is madly in love with him. But he doesn't have any feelings for her so he arranges for them to meet at an isolated café called The Second Act in the presence of his friend Willy (Raphaël Quenard who plays the title character in Dupieux's excellent YANNICK). Florence brings her father Guillaume (Vincent Lindon from TITANE) along and, in the presence of hopeless waiter Stéphane (Manuel Guillot), the scene is set for sheer excruciating awkwardness.

However, the story quickly becomes more awkward, and the film itself more meta, as the actors constantly break character, complain about their roles, insult each other, and prolong the telling of the story. At one point it transpires they are acting in the first film ever to be written and directed by AI, and the AI even comes to talk to them via a laptop.

Even at a brisk 80 minutes (a typical run time for a Dupieux opus) THE SECOND ACT does begin to flounder in its attempts to go even more 'super meta' at the end, but even so this is a very funny, inventive, ambitious piece of work, one which on the one hand occasionally feels like Beckett or Pirandello while on the other could almost be an 80 minute Monty Python sketch. Some of the sequences are laugh out loud hilarious, especially a wine pouring scene that just goes on and on and becomes funnier as it does so.  It might just be Dupieux's best work so far. Fans will need no further persuasion and if you're yet to encounter his work this is an excellent place to start. Here's a clip that unfortunately doesn't do the film justice as it's one of the rare bits where no-one really breaks character:

Quentin Dupieux's THE SECOND ACT is out on digital from Signature Entertainment now.