From Cannes 2024, Quentin Dupieux’s film about the making of the first AI movie, „The Second Act,“ is an amusing trifle, and very meta.
Workers at the 77th Cannes Film Festival have threatened to go on strike. The escalating conflict in Gaza has raised concerns about protests and disruptions. One of the festival’s directors, Mohammad Rasoulof, is hiding in an undisclosed European location after fleeing his home country of Iran, which sentenced him to flogging and prison time for making his new movie. Another unnamed director, according to rumors in Cannes, may become the subject of #MeToo allegations before the festival ends.
In other words, things are serious at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
So what better way to kick it off than with a comedy?
That’s what Cannes did on Tuesday night, launching the festival with “The Second Act” by jokey provocateur Quentin Dupieux, a 50-year-old director and musician whose films tend toward the raucous and transgressive, virtually all of them with healthy doses of humor. He’s made movies about a psychokinetic tire that kills people (“Rubber”), a man who thinks his deerskin jacket is talking to him (“Deerskin”), a giant fly and the men who try to tame it (“Mandibles”) and a team of superheroes sent on a weekend retreat after they fail to kill a giant turtle (“Smoking Causes Coughing”).
His new one is less far fetched; it’s a comedy about the movie business, and it’s less a provocation than a goof. At a sprightly 82 minutes, it’s also slight, which meant it had to struggle to hold up its position as the climax of a grand opening ceremony in the big, classy Grand Theatre Lumiere and the ceremonial bestowal of an Honorary Palme d’Or on Meryl Streep by French icon Juliette Binoche, who couldn’t hold back the tears as the presented the award.
Still, the idea of opening this festival with a comedy has become a habit for Cannes.
