Cannes 2024: The Second Act is a messy fable about filmmaking

★★★ | Quentin Dupieux

Opening night at the Cannes Film Festival, and it’s hard to know what to expect. Will the first feature be a heady, dour affair about the political climate on our globe? Will it skewer some hot topic talking point? In the case of The Second Act, it’s a bit of both, and a whole lot of nothing.

The Second Act is, above all, a showcase for the luminous talent involved. The cast is some of the best French actors around, and each deliver pitch-perfect performances in what is a talky, overlong film. They are so good, in fact, that you’d be fooled to think the film had more to say than it actually does.

Dupieux’s feature is about different forms of anxiety, but most of all it’s anxious about itself. The art of cinema is rapidly changing, and a big part of that is AI. A perversion of everything good about art, it’s an assault of the untalented, encroaching upon that which has enriched culture for over a century. Yet Dupieux, for all his witticism, can’t articulate why AI’s inclusion in film — let alone any art — is an absurd proposition. By the time he goes for the jugular, we’ve grown tired of the argument.

Part of that might be the point. The story, a classic farce of boy meets girl, serves as a meta-commentary on filmmaking by committee. Everything is drawn out, and subtext is for cowards. But by pressing the point, Dupieux loses sight of what makes satire effective in the first place. Good satire is like a knife in the dark. It pierces and disappears before you know what happened. Staying around to explain why you were stabbed in the first place robs it of its power.

This is kind of what Dupieux does, though. His previous film, Smoking Causes Coughing, was an elaborately long shaggy dog story, which I loved for its insistence on never letting the audience off easy. In The Second Act, Dupieux similarly tests the patience of everyone watching, impishly deriving pleasure from their squirming. By the time the third fake-out comes along, this time involving the MeToo-movement, you can almost hear Dupieux cackling from behind the camera.

Yet it’s not as satisfying as his previous outings, even as there is a lot to love about it. I’m ambivalent over its length, and I feel the final punchline isn’t as precise as it could be. It leaves us with an overwhelming sensation of, “that’s it?” And then it does the damnedest thing: It never lets us go. Weeks later, The Second Act haunts me, and I can’t quite articulate why.

Let’s see AI make anything half as effective.