SummaryIn the middle of a performance of the play "Le Cocu", a very bad boulevard, Yannick gets up and interrupts the show to take the evening back in hand.
SummaryIn the middle of a performance of the play "Le Cocu", a very bad boulevard, Yannick gets up and interrupts the show to take the evening back in hand.
Dupieux’s fans will be happy to know that his surreal humor is gloriously intact, while newcomers might find in this movie a gateway into one of contemporary cinema’s most idiosyncratic universes.
Buried under Yannick’s aggression and chafed emotions, he’s wanting for the basic need of being understood. This side of Yannick enhances Dupieux’s critique with a casual observation: Art is freeing, and without it, we’re doomed to lonesome misery.
Dupieux’s latest will either annoy or charm you depending on how much you appreciate being led around by the nose by a filmmaker and a cast of characters who seem pretty committed to jerking you around.
Yannick may boast fewer visual flourishes than the director’s previous, but this more minimalist approach only heightens the young rebel and the film’s own fight: an attempt to change the rules of the game, to blur the divide between author and viewer, and open up the medium to the absurd––if only for 67 exuberant minutes.
The film, which is just over an hour long, dishes out some smart twists and a few good laughs, as well as a decent level of suspense. But like many of Dupieux’s movies, it’s also a strong concept in search of something more.
Yannick doesn’t try blurring the lines between reality and performance in any Pirandellian way. The comedy is simpler than that. Yet there’s a touch of sadness as Yannick realises, as many other dramatists have done, that the actors are the ones getting the glory.