Quentin Dupieux’s Meta Satire The Second Act Is a Misfire

Just as much as they play like extended absurdist comedy bits, the fun-size films of Quentin Dupieux have always been about cinema. From the on-screen audiences of Rubber and Yannick to the Marvel-spoofing antics of Smoking Causes Coughing and Deerskin’s wink-wink reflection on all the weird things you can get away with just by calling yourself a filmmaker, the French auteur’s movies have always flexed their self-awareness. It was probably just a matter of time, then, before the writer-director-editor-cinematographer tackled the subject of filmmaking head-on, as he does in his Cannes-opening The Second Act. With characteristic Dupieux surreality, though, The Second Act isn’t a simple meta affair, but mind-bendingly so: It’s a movie about the making of a movie about movie-making, in which the boundaries between each nested film are deliberately left nebulous.
This labyrinthine conceit is abruptly revealed in the middle of The Second Act‘s first major scene—one of two ballsy tracking shots that are at least 10 minutes long—during which David (Louis Garrel) tries to convince his oafish friend Willy (Yannick breakout Raphaël Quenard) to woo a besotted woman he hasn’t been able to shake off. As a distrustful Willy tries to find “the catch” in David’s offer—crassly quizzing him on the woman’s weight and whether she uses a wheelchair—David exasperatedly shatters the fourth wall when he gestures in the audience’s direction and scolds Willy for a transphobic comment: “Don’t say that, we’re being filmed! Do you want us to get canceled?”
The inauthenticity, ignorance and navel-gazing vanity of the stars are the butt of many of The Second Act‘s jibes, in this scene and across its 80 minutes (a typically tight runtime for Dupieux). After working with Adèle Exarchopoulos, Jean Dujardin and Adèle Haenel, Dupieux continues his speedrun of the French acting community by casting Vincent Lindon and Léa Seydoux as David and Willy’s pompous co-stars on the set of a bad rom-com, which is The Second Act‘s smallest movie matryoshka doll.
In line with the film’s general comic target, Lindon and Seydoux’s characters are ironic subversions of their own real-life personas, with the artistically daring Seydoux playing a middling actress with delusions of grandeur whose exasperated child thinks her too emotionally weak for a “normal” job. In the part of Guillaume, Lindon (France’s finest purveyor of gruff-yet-sensitive masculinity) is a thin-skinned, macho actor who petulantly announces he’s quitting the biz (movies feel meaningless when it looks like the credits are about to roll on planet Earth as we know it), only for his flattered ego to quickly recant those retirement plans when he gets an offer for a part in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie.