The new Quentin Dupieux (Smoking makes you cough, Incredible but true, The deer) digs a little deeper into his filmography of the absurd and nonsense, with Yannick, in theaters Wednesday, August 2. Always served by a first-class cast, he invites Raphaël Quenard to play Yannick, a spectator who, from his armchair, challenges actors on stage: Blanche Gardin, Pio Marmaï and Sébastien Chassagne. His claim: the failed evening he suffers through their fault. Pure Dupieux, hilarious.
The Ball of the Schizos
On a theater stage, a couple dines with Madame’s lover in a bad vaudeville. Suddenly, a spectator stands up and challenges the actors. His name is Yannick and he is having a “really bad evening” because the play sucks and they play like shit. The dialogue begins between the four, without the public reacting, until it is taken to task.
What a “hairy”. Quentin Dupieux takes us into a situation of which he has the secret, incongruous, extreme and assumed. Raphaël Quenard, seen in Smoking makes you cough, Cut, November, Mandibles, plays the great dadais, naive and vindictive, as if escaped from a HP Opposite, “their arms fall”: lose their footing. The time of a medium-length film of one hour seven, Dupieux lets loose on the artists and the public, in a first and second degree schizo, where the burlesque, is no longer physical, but pataphysical. The slapstick is in the verb.
vertiginous comic
Dupieux develops a rhetoric of paradox in his films, renewing itself each time. A tire is a serial killer, a suburban house hides a spatiotemporal door, an accused becomes an executioner, a giant fly is discovered in the trunk of a stolen car… If we do not enter into the axiom of his delirium , no chance to join. There is Monty Pythons in Dupieux, absurdity and British, French, Dada, Belgian, Dutch nonsense… A nonsensical Internationale of meaning, “crazy” à la Pierre Dac.
The exchange between Yannick and the actors in the play crosses a range of tones that goes from astonishment, to negotiation, to panic, to the involvement of the public on the screen, and finally, to that of the spectator in the cinema hall. The setting of the theater stages the essence of ancient dramaturgy where the public challenged the actors. Fellini had reconstructed a representation of it in a burlesque scene from Satyricon (1970). Dupieux, on the other hand, orchestrates a dramatic crescendo where each line is a surprise, a revival, of a dizzying comedy that energizes the text. The staging plays with a short montage on the characters framed at each line, whereas one could expect sequence shots. Another paradox. Incredible sleight of hand, the film still delights long after its viewing. Delighted, Yannick.
The sheet
Gender : Comedy
Director: Quentin Dupieux
Actors: Raphaël Quenard, Blanche Gardin, Pio Marmaï and Sébastien Chassagne
Country : France
Duration : 1h07
Exit : August 02, 2023
Distributer : Diaphana Cast