Léa Seydoux and Vincent Lindon in THE SECOND ACT.
Another year, another edition of the Cannes at Home miniseries, specially made to combat cinephile FOMO for those of us not at the French Riviera. For the next week or so, let's explore the filmographies of directors in competition. However, since the festival opened with the latest Quentin Dupieux project, it seems fitting to start our at-home festival by considering the auteur's career and the oddball creations that have made him something of a king of weirdness within contemporary French cinema. Not that such status comes with guaranteed acclaim. The opposite is true, with Dupieux's cinema caught in perpetual polemic, each work more divisive than what came before.
Such is the case with The Second Act, where the director proposes a comedy on the absurdities of making an AI-based film. Not even Léa Seydoux, Louis Garrel, Vincent Lindon, and Raphaël Quenard could prevent the usual, not entirely undeserved critiques that befall every new Dupieux…
STEAK (2007)
A man rides a military vehicle down the road, his proud visage against the wind. As the camera zooms on his countenance, the guy's hair flies off, revealing a bald head beneath. He's flabbergasted as the toupee falls to the road like roadkill and we, the audience, are invited to laugh at the absurdity of it all. And then he crashes, off-screen, perchance perishing in the upturned vehicle as gasoline pools around him. There are no explanations or context, just the facile gag and a sense of the world gone mad. So starts the feature filmography of Quentin Dupieux, the DJ and electronic musician also known as Mr. Oizo.
It's the perfect start for a career often defined by instant bursts of creativity at the beginning of projects that then lose steam as they go. A common criticism aimed at the director is that his pictures have exciting concepts and nothing else, leading to such "balloon losing air" structures. While I understand where such complaints come from, I can't entirely cosign them. Take that feature debut as an example. Though Steak is never quite as wonderful as its opening salvo, the 2007 film still packs a punch of twisted ideas, as if pitching the themes and strategies that will characterize most of the director's forthcoming projects.
From that capsized vehicle, a young man retrieves weaponry, using it to enact a killing spree against his classmates. However, an unrelated friend gets saddled with accusations of mass murder, suffering the sentence that rightfully belonged to another. After spending years in a psychiatric hospital, the unlucky sod reunites with the real criminal, now embroiled in a gang whose members parade in a James Dean-like uniform of red jackets and jeans, drink milk à la Clockwork Orange, and change their faces through improvised cosmetic surgery. They also spend their days playing a mix of cricket and mental arithmetic, but sportive math is beside the point.
RUBBER (2010)
What endures is an impression of nonsensical, highly ritualized violence that will echo across Dupieux's filmography like a leitmotiv. There's connective tissue between such horror and an implicit critique of social norms by which one imposes order unto chaos and attributes value to valueless gestures. It further correlates to the casualness each film cultivates as its baseline tone, a thin patina of quotidian boredom that only makes the madness more apparent. A nightmare is doubly shocking if no one seems to acknowledge it. The lunacy is but a commonplace nuisance for characters whose numbness alienates them from the audience, the camera, and each other.
Though Dupieux had a long list of artistic projects under his belt – mostly music and shorts – by the time of his sophomore feature, it's still impressive that his magnum opus came so early. Rubber follows Steak's example by starting with its boldest gesture, a direct address monologue that lays out Dupieux's thesis. "Why is the alien brown? No reason…why do the two characters fall madly in love with each other? No reason…Life itself is filled with no reason." – a satirical mission statement like few in the history of cinema, unashamed of its quasi-nihilistic embrace of nonsense and a worldview where, essentially, nothing matters.
Everything is fake in that tale of a film within a film, a slasher starring a telekinetic tire out for blood in the American desert. But beneath the rage, there's joy, for Rubber becomes a celebration of illusion, especially acute when the parameters of unreality collapse, further confounding the narrative Matryoshka. Rubber is metafiction unbound by rules, a critique of the industry that's not inoculated against the same vices it points the finger at, giddy to make itself a fool in the process. Indeed, for all his heady ideas, Dupieux never takes himself too seriously, accepting that his cinema, too, is anodyne absurdity.
WRONG (2011)
Those qualities can be easily taken as faults, especially when the pictures refuse to engage with the spectator in traditional terms. The lack of dimension to the characters is another barrier, though not a constant one. When he got to his third feature, Wrong, Dupieux tried a register closer to the character study. Anchored by a bizarre but compelling performance by Jack Plotnick, that flick considers a man who lost his dog, trapped in a vicious circle of non-reason and in a world where everything is out of whack, and nobody seems to have answers. There's also a tenor of existentialism in its conceits, like an office worker who's been fired but keeps returning to his desk to pantomime labor in front of an inactive computer. Also, it's raining inside.
The unmoored cog always comes back to the machine, for what awaits beyond is total purposelessness. Maybe because of that, Wrong includes such passages as the moment when someone drives to the end of the world, a void of flatland where the emptiness could swallow a person whole. It's an anguished movie, where normalcy interrupted destabilizes a man's entire being, and, through him, Dupieux's cinema transcends laughs and eye-rolls to reach for emotional resonance. It's violent, because of course it is, yet oddly comforting. It's a story about appreciating the simple matter of being here, existing. Through these matters and despite a certain meekness, Wrong is Dupieux's most hopeful film, his most optimistic about humanity.
WRONG COPS (2014)
One wonders how he came up with it since the two projects that sandwich the thing – the Wrong Cops short and feature – are the inverse. In those misbegotten larks, Dupieux tackles police violence in a model of humor that was exhausting in short form and unbearable when extended to feature length. In this and other works, one clashes with the sad reality that much of the director's irony can be pretty reactionary. There's a conservative brattishness to the material, a politically incorrect provocation that rings hollow. Instead of questioning the the audience's values, his work suggests the airs of a disaffected teen who thinks themselves smarter than they are.
In other words, a straight line connects Marilyn Manson's Wrong Cops ugliness to Adèle Exarchopoulos' Greta Thunberg parody in Mandibles. And they're both deplorable. That being said, even the director's minor and meaner works can contain points of interest. In the Cops duology, a new sophistication emerges in the cineaste's visual strategy, manifest first and foremost through optical warping. It's a dissonance with Dupieux's early works, though there's a continuation of his preference for raw, overexposed digital footage. From Wrong Cops to Reality to his later French films, one starts to register experiments that are almost as unnerving as the man's loopy writing.
REALITY (2014)
Consider how Dupieux's use of spherical lenses with minimum focal depths creates a dizzying effect of constant distortion. You almost feel your eyes straining to perceive a world where space bends around the characters, and every environment looks on the verge of dematerialization. It's not beautiful in the traditional sense, but neither is it inexpressive. Instead, the director evokes an unbalanced impression that further alienates the spectator while promoting a new form of engagement. Maybe that's why 2014's Reality feels like a signal of maturation, foretelling a cinematic evolution that's becoming more thought-provoking, step by step, slow but steady.
But of course, one cannot talk about Reality, that mosaic where eczemas start on the inside of one's head, and everybody's dreaming, without mentioning it was the last of Dupieux's American pictures. Afterward, the French expat would return to the motherland, abandoning some of the benefits stateside productions afforded him. Namely, the stiltedness of his English dialogue, sometimes delivered by French actors struggling with unfamiliar tongues. Or the genre play that works best when created under the shadow of the American film industry. On the other hand, shooting in France allowed him new liberties, as one can see in Keep an Eye Out.
KEEP AN EYE OUT (2018)
Circling back to cop narratives, that film is akin to a chamber piece, set primarily inside the Parisian headquarters of the French Communist Party. Ensconced within Oscar Niemeyer's creation, Dupieux puts forward a simple premise cum question: How does one prove one's innocence when those in charge of deciding your fate are beyond reason? The twist near the end will pull the rug from under the spectator's feet, contextualizing the madness within non-consensual theatricality and an echo of Rubber's quasi-nihilism. Nothing matters in these French films, but another reading can emerge with less destructive conclusions. Think, for instance, of Dupieux as a Dadaist rather than the Surrealist label so many viewers project on him.
Following such notions takes us to a place of intentional irrationality, where one breaks the conventional forms of art as a tool to question art itself and, subsequently, negate the status quo of everyday life. Rather than aiming for oneiric dimensions, Dupieux's films are grounded in quotidian casualness so as to attack them from an insider perspective. It's crucial that things appear superficially regular in such cinematic variations so that the madness can better erupt and make us ponder everything we accept. It's anti-culture, almost anti-cinema, and it manifests gleefully through such works as Deerskin, Mandibles, Incredible But True, Smoking Causes Coughing, and Yannick.
MANDIBLES (2020)
Indeed, many of those pictures represent a mutilation of classics or cultural behemoths. Like Rubber, Deerskin re-appropriates the formula of slasher films and even horror filmmaking as a whole. Only, instead of some portentous symbol of evil, a spirit or monster, we have a jacket. Mandibles was edified as an E.T. parody, trading the friendly alien for a giant fly who eats innocent dogs. Its setting further invokes an idea of Rohmerian summer, all twisted and deformed by Dupieux's imagination. Smoking Causes Coughing, for its part, aims its parodical purview at superhero cinema, revealing the abject stupidity of it while inventing new derangements for its spandex-clad heroes.
In last year's Yannick, Dupieux and company reached the closest they ever came to serious cinema, though the cultural disruption continues strong. That gesture is almost literalized by a madman's vocal critique of a mediocre stage play. With a gun in hand, he sequesters actors and their audience. Dupieux does the same by other methods, but the results are similar in their maddening effect. Only, this time, some of that emotional resonance from Wrong re-emerges, leading to an ending closer to tragedy than parody. The Dadaist king of weird never stops, so we've had Daaaaali and The Second Act since Yannick, perchance the start of a new phase in Dupieux's career.
YANNICK (2023)
For those who are on these films' specific wavelength, it's reason to rejoice. For those who never acquired a taste for the madman's cinema, it's another mess to endure. Where do you fall, dear reader?