Ultra-prolific and ultra-irreverent auteur Quentin Dupieux brings us one of his most throwaway works to date (and that really is saying something for the writer-director behind goofy outings like Rubber and Mandibles) with The Second Act, a film about things other movies might take seriously that Dupieux cannot bring himself to really care about. It’s the sort of ironic remove which has certainly worked for me with some of his past films, but here I found mostly insufferable; an annoying movie about annoying people that lacks the sort of instant surreal hook of Dupieux’s best work and, crucially, is just not very funny.
Timely in its way, The Second Act follows four actors on set in a roadside café as they perform a scene for the first film ever to be written and directed entirely by AI. Except, we don’t know it’s about that for quite a while – Dupieux introduces to these actors and their roles in the film within the film (which might even be within another film) long before the computerised director pops up. They’re making some sort of romcom that none of them seem particularly thrilled by, scenes constantly spiralling out of control as the actors end up at each other’s throats, from old-school homophobe Guillaume (Vincent Lindon) to long-suffering and self-conscious Florence (Lea Seydoux).
It’s all very meta and all very ‘what is real?!’ but I can’t say I was ever particularly interested by any of it, even with the heavyweight French acting talent (Louis Garrel is also present as the ostensible leading man David). Part of this is just personal preference – there are quite a few debates about the ‘real world value’ of cinema and acting and, for me, there isn’t a single subject less interesting to discuss in a movie than that – but the jokes here are also just really bland.
The Second Act is obviously framed as a comedy, from the absurdity of a glitchy AI director laptop being carried around by a set runner to an extra playing a waiter who is so nervous that he keeps spilling the wine he’s meant to serve, but I never laughed, and only rarely raised a smile. Its most impressive moments come early on with some precisely choreographed long-take conversations following the actors on their way to the café, walking down a long, long road without any cuts as the camera trundles alongside them.
In fact, it’s the insanely long dolly track that makes these moments possible that Dupieux chooses to leave as the film’s final image, and it is an admittedly powerful one. After all the sarcastic, airy nothing that has defined a lot of The Second Act, this little tribute to the purely physical, and irreplaceable, *graft* of filmmaking that AI couldn’t dream of doing is a nice little moment of earnestness to close out on. A nice little coda to an otherwise irritating experience.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 