Spoiler Alert!
Open and shut, Le Deuxième Acte begins the 77th Cannes Film Festival with a plot so meta that the swirling happy hour conversations and upcoming expert panels on “Film x AI” are settled with a simple: good luck.
This film about a film about a film explores AI’s capacity to take over the cinema industry and our own capacity to resist that. Less world-building than Inception but less world-ending than Megalopolis, Quentin Dupieux’s Le Deuxième Acte opens the festival with a subject matter that induces three layers of reality, effectively priming the Cannes audience this year with a basis of suspicion of the films to follow. Including conversations about PC culture, getting “canceled,” and mental disorders, the film also attempts to be as present and punchy as possible, both in subject matters and in script.
The film opens with four characters who meet for lunch so that a girlfriend can introduce her father to her boyfriend, who has slyly brought along his friend to try to pawn his crazy girlfriend off onto.
However, after the opening scenes, the plot divulges into a series of fourth wall breaks in which we meet new character identities each time. The characters first break reality with a quarrel over how terrible the others are at acting in the film or their controversial political beliefs. At lunch, they encounter a “waiter” who also breaks the fourth wall to reveal that he is an extra on their set and very thrilled to be in a movie with the four big actors. But then, the waiter-extra becomes so intimidated by his stage fright that he walks out of the diner to his car where he shoots himself. (The theater gasps.)
Then, the film finds a third layer of reality when he revives himself and we are in the final, true(?) reality. In such, the four actors actually admire one another and enjoy collaborating. This is also when we find out that their film about a film is written and directed by AI.
**N.B. Critics often avoid spoilers such as the waiter-extra’s suicide or any other plot shocks and significant endings. However, discussing the third reality, created by the faux suicide, is essential in understanding what Dupieux did with this story. As such, I will continue on with an even bigger spoiler.
After the AI dismisses the cast from filming for the day, we watch them reject the man playing the waiter-extra, refusing to stay in touch or trade contacts. After watching him suffer through these social rejections with those more successful than him, he eventually commits suicide exactly as we just saw him do in the movie, in his car with a gun from the glove compartment.
After seeing the first, faux suicide, the audience watches this second one without a gasp, waiting for him to wake up again, hoping for a fourth reality. We are not awarded one. Instead, the final shot of a never-ending camera ground track rail rolls us backward and backward away from a view of the mountain landscape.
Le Deuxième Acte’s meta plot layers degrees of film and reality, in which the actors’ personalities ultimately still mirror the characters they play, twice over.
The actor-waiter is our guide through Dupieux’s universe. He is indeed a smaller actor who is thrilled to be on set with such stars, all while he plays a smaller actor who is burdened to death (literally) in fear of not performing well. The layers of reality dissolve when we see that this man is the same throughout them all.
In the penultimate scene, David, played by Louis Garrel, presents Florence, played by Léa Seydoux, with his “theory” as to why she is so exhausted after a day on set. He offers to her that he is never exhausted by a day on set or acting in general because reality is fiction and film is reality.
In this handy abstract of a scene, the theory allows Dupieux to speak to us about not only the future of technology and film but also the everlasting tension between fiction and reality, which claims to be unwavering in the face of such technology as AI.
Through the theory, David practically explains the reasoning behind the layering of scenes that we just witnessed. The characters that the actors adopt are just exaggerated versions of themselves. Dupieux speaks through David offering that no matter the level of reality, AI-generated or not, we cannot escape ourselves. In fact, we seek out cinema so that we don’t have to. No matter what is technically “real,” cinema is a haven for the exploration of the self.
Wrapped up by the daunting final shot, Le Deuxième Acte opens Cannes with a declaration and elevation of cinema as essential, even surpassing, of our own reality. As the film progresses, one can see each actor’s core take form, or, perhaps more pointedly, see them break down. In each layer of reality, the characters become more approachable, more personable, more “realistic.” Indeed it is their characters that set them free and allow their true inhibitions to emerge.
This, in conversation with the presence of AI, while a bleak image for such cinephiles to witness, gives hope to film-tech collaborations. Even while we watch a stilted, glitchy AI “director” boss around the actors, we still find their commitment to their craft to be unchanged, especially to David. We find the principles of their practice to be ever-human.
Within that craft, Le Deuxième Acte’s true triumph is its acting, most incredibly through Léa Seydoux’s performance. From a script that no doubt created a confusing table read before production, the cast’s ability to snap between different levels of reality and different levels of a layered character is what elevates Le Deuxième Acte to Cannes.
Dupieux shows us that AI cannot hurt film’s core ability to give us more realities than one. However, from the waiter-extra’s real suicide, we learn that even AI cannot save us from ourselves. Our human instincts to exclude and reject will outlast any technological advancements, and harm us more than any robot ever could.
In the final shot of the camera’s own ground track, which slowly deforms, the AI looks at itself. In the dizzying, long-winded image, the theater is exhausted by the shot. After learning of AI’s role within the film, the audience ends its first night at Cannes watching a piece of film equipment become aware of itself. After a mostly comedic hour and a half with four of France’s current premier actors, the theater quiets, and we are left haunted by our own reality watching this film.
While Cannes ponders and debates “where cinema is headed,” Dupieux opens the festival with a film that places a mirror towards the industry, asking it to watch, but more importantly, to heed, itself.