Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.
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The Second Act (Quentin Dupieux, 2024).
There is a filmmaker who makes movies that are above all conceptual, with the story but a brittle skeleton barely holding the thing together. He makes at least one movie a year, all under 90 minutes, all modestly casual affairs with various doses of drollness; and all feature a philosophical premise or metaphysical quandary at their core. He writes, directs, shoots, and edits the films himself. Dissenters tend to think he isn’t funny and that all his movies are tedious and basically the same; fans, of course, hold the opposite opinion. He opened the Cannes Film Festival this year, but despite what you may assume, this filmmaker isn’t Hong Sang-soo; rather, it’s Quentin Dupieux, who also shares with Hong a cinema of welcome brevity and levity. These might be the reasons why The Second Act was chosen for Cannes’s opening night, as a pomp-diffuser—but more likely it’s actually because of the intrinsic pomp of its French superstars: Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, and Louis Garrel. It also doesn’t hurt that the film is about filmmaking, for no one likes films about filmmaking more than film people.
The Second Act begins as a dialogue-heavy drama pairing off Seydoux and Lindon, Garrel and Raphaël Quenard, as they head to meet at the titular roadside restaurant, when suddenly Quenard addresses the camera directly after he ad-libs a line his partner thinks is too offensive. We are, it turns out, watching actors make a movie, and this incursion is the norm in The Second Act: alongside bits of the rote love story they are nominally enacting, characters veer off their script mid-shot; they start talking about their roles, their sexual preferences and prejudices, and their career opportunities and frustrations. Ultimately, they agree to return to the movie at hand, and yet they cannot but stop the scenes again and again to start some other extra-dramatic business. In this way, each of the three stars of the French screen sends up some of the types they regularly play: tearful (Seydoux), incensed (Lindon), and sullen (Garrel). The principle premise is that the movie we’re watching never stops; there is no behind-the-scenes conceit, no rupture in film form between movie-being-made and movie-being-watched. Rather, there is a fluidity between, or perhaps even a unity of, the filmed world and the one inhabited by the actors. What we’re watching is the collapse of reality and fiction—albeit a fictitious collapse, since none of the characters share names with their actors. There is nothing outside their movie; the frame contains it all.
Like so many Dupieux concepts, this is a simple but effective device wrung completely dry by The Second Act’s barely two-act narrative scope. The film superficially pokes fun at celebrity and the difference between on-screen personas—conventional, hem-bound—and off-screen ones—secretive, contentious, offensive. More potently, the film characterizes existence—anyone’s—as being trapped in a constant play of performances that embrace and refute expectation with a mixture of commitment and frustration, with no set (or safe) standard of fact or fantasy. Bravura long-take tracking shots of dragged-out conversations underline this point, with single scenes unspooling in unbroken time and space giving the actors the breadth to be one thing and another, visibly flip-flopping yet also clearly the character and the actor all at once, and never breaking the illusion of being in Dupieux’s film. In fact, they seem stuck in this strange world.
The Second Act (Quentin Dupieux, 2024).
With only partially intended irony, the non-stars, Quenard, the lead of Dupieux’s Yannick (2023), and Manuel Guillot, who plays an extra experiencing disastrous anxiety over his first acting gig, upstage the veteran celebrities. Quenard’s ingratiating style of conversational confrontation and Guillot’s wine-spilling jangled nerves give the film much-needed spikes of energy while Seydoux, London, and Garrel mostly spin their acting wheels doing what they always do—which is partly the joke, surely, but also a failure of imagination. (Few things are more tiresome in movies than when actors think they are satirizing their own kind.) The overall tone isn’t that of the tense, attenuated cultural satire of Yannick (along with the even better Daaaaaalí!, a one-two knock-out of great films Dupieux premiered last year), but rather an exasperated, flailing, and monotonous cinematic despair: the actors are lost, movies are forgettable, the world’s on fire, what are we even doing here?!
The pièce de résistance is a late-stage revelation that the film within the film is written and directed by AI (a joke that extend to the production apparatus, as no crew is visible), a kicker to the Netflix co-production logo at the film’s beginning (not a joke, alas) underlining the fraught circumstances in which mainstream cinema finds itself. Dupieux stages this anxiety as comic irreverence and wry frustration, and giving such droll absurdity a major spotlight at Cannes is a welcome change in a festival culture that focuses predominantly on darker subjects. Yet Dupieux’s surrealism—though not as consistent or hard-hitting, it must be said that he is our era’s low-key Buñuel—shares equal screen credit with a justifiable bitterness. It may seem solipsistic to open Cannes with an escape from the problems of the world to those of the movies, but in these characters struggling to know how to act at a Godot-like purgatorial waystation, one can see that a story about being in the world of cinema is also about being in the world at large.
Scénarios (Jean-Luc Godard, 2024).
It comes as a galvanizing surprise that a more hopeful outlook on cinema could be found in the revelation of another new work (!) by the late Jean-Luc Godard. The eighteen-minute Scénarios, like last year’s Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars,’ is at once an extremely condensed short film unto itself and a machine casting us forward in time to imagine the many movies that could be expanded, drawn, or inspired from it. Far from being declarative final works, these seem like Godard’s gift to future audiences and future filmmakers.
Made of two parts, titled “DNA” and “MRI” (the latter scored nightmarishly to the clatter of the diagnostic machine), Scénarios follows the minimal-movement, blunt-impact collage technique the aged master used from The Image Book (2018) onward. The essay film is an elusive but potent mixture of still images of paintings, photographs, self-portraits, and film frames—some distorted or murkily reproduced, some unrecognizable yet chosen with forceful purpose—as well as clips of his own films (a couple’s confused farewell in Germany Year 90 Nine Zero [1991]; the roadside corpses of Weekend [1967]) and other movies (a perennial return to Rossellini’s Rome, Open City [1945]), terrifying audio snippets (“final warning”!), and epigrammatic citations (these include a peak-JLG riddle: Jean-Paul Sarte’s montagist idea that “taking a white horse to illustrate the fact that horses are not horses is less effective than taking non-horses to illustrate the fact that horses are not horses”). The meaning of the imagery is very open, or obscure, and space is left for us to pursue the reference, colliding or contrasting what we see and hear to create something new. Often the visuals seem intended to stand in for what could not be fully filmed by the 91-year-old during the last week of his life—images of love bound, of art, of murder and war—which we must instead take in and extrapolate in our minds, by our own methods.
The final section, which dwells on death (the comic tragedy of the distended, artificial gunfight in Band of Outsiders [1964]; Camille’s dead body in Contempt [1963]), takes on an unusually transparent and moving connotation. The film concludes with an immensely intimate documentary shot of the aged artist sitting on his bed, shirt open and belly exposed, no shame and all bared only a day before his death, reading the Sartre quote, heard earlier, about showing something to suggest that something else is not itself. We see a man who has set the day and time of his death saying these words, these ideas, flubbing the reading, and continuing, finishing the recitation, the film—finishing showing that something and leaving its implied suggestion to the audience.
Exposé du film annonce du film Scénario (Jean-Luc Godard, 2024).
Made from Godard’s conception and under his supervision during the final days of his life, this viewing experience and its final scene would be an overwhelming conclusion, but in fact was followed by another remarkable new work, Exposé du film annonce du film Scénario, a 34-minute documentary shot in 2021 of Godard paging through a handmade “brochure” for a feature film called Scénario. Ultimately what is shown has little to do with the completed short film shown before it, beyond its collage form, but the two combine, in montage, to make a third film for the audience. With remarkable candor, this longer work reveals the legend confidently walking us through the book—that is, a proposed film—outlining its structure, its images, what needs to be shot and what could be still or recycled imagery, and thus his vision for a film to be made. With his assistants Fabrice Aragno and Jean-Paul Battaggia documenting and asking specific questions about intent, we see something akin to an old master’s workshop, where younger artists execute the vision of their teacher in his style and under his supervision. (This is, in fact, how the short Scénarios was made during Godard’s final days.) With unforced adulation, the camera films Godard’s hands gesticulating over the book, straining to express and elaborate (written on one page: “etc. ++++”), flipping forward and back (a unique property, Godard notes, of books that should not be allowed in movies), relishing the scrapbook’s texture and even editing and updating before our eyes. For a few precious minutes, we see a very special artist casually walking us nearly image by image and reference by reference through his notoriously challenging work. He comes off endearingly transparent about the complexities and ambiguities of the project, its uncertainties and openness. Again, Godard is helping us look forward, toward possibilities. The scrapbook and its explanation resembles in its format Phony Wars and Scénarios, a true collage of found imagery—pop, filmic, painterly, quotational, and personal—a dense essay whose evocations are rich and whose narrative and cohesive meaning is elusive, not the least because the planned feature film was never made.
“A mysterious conclusion,” Godard chucklingly notes once, and in fact perhaps the greatest aspect of this infinitely rich micro-portrait is realizing how flexible and fluid his craft his, how the work he is presenting is still not finished, still being thought through, still has blank pages and more possibilities. He had more to do, and so do we—watching this and Scénarios, you can’t but walk away buzzing with the desire to carry Godard’s vision forward. This is far from the amusing despair of The Second Act, a film which suggests the end of things. The man who so frequently aligned the cinema’s death to his own keeps leaving us with paths to the future.
