Cannes at Home: Day 1 – Quentin Dupieux is the King of Weird

by Cláudio Alves

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…

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Review: "Deerskin" on HBO

by Cláudio Alves

Fashion kills in one of Quentin Dupieux's latest absurdist comedies, the loony nightmare that is Deerskin. After blessing moviegoers with the nonsensical sight of a homicidal tire in Rubber, the French director has now imbued a fringed jacket with the power to unravel the human mind and precipitate its wearers into paroxysms of murderous madness. Jean Dujardin's Georges is the victim of such demonic influence, though, at the start, he, like all things in Deerskin, appears unnervingly mundane…

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