Six days. This is what it took for Quentin Dupieux to complete the filming of his latest feature film, Yannick, whose plot takes place behind closed doors in a theater. On his Facebook page, the filmmaker declared that he wanted to “return to his first love, that is to say the impossible film”, and satisfy this “taste for films that should not exist”.
Freed from the traditional constraints of production, the director has also done away with the absurd elements and spatiotemporal pirouettes that have made his mark. No giant flies here (Mandibles2021) nor a twisted love story with a fur jacket (The deer, 2019). Calmed down, Quentin Dupieux? Not as much as you might think.
Set in a realistic setting, the plot of Yannick is devoid of any artifice, designed to respond to the chronological challenges posed by closed doors. And although the lack of time and means is apparent in the simplicity of the setting and the staging, it is in the crazy and clever screenplay that all the talent of France’s most irreverent filmmaker is displayed.
The film therefore opens in full performance of the play The cuckold, a very bad vaudeville. On stage, three actors deliver their lines in an uninspired tone, to the enthusiastic and automatic laughter of the audience. The evening takes an unexpected turn when a spectator, Yannick, gets up and interrupts the show to indicate his displeasure.
The man, who works as a night guard in a parking lot, took the day off and took more than 45 minutes to cross Paris and get to the theater. However, he believes that the entertainment he was promised is not worth the money and time wasted. Initially polite, Yannick takes out his revolver when the actors persist in denigrating his approach. Taking the entire room hostage, he gives himself the mandate to rewrite the play.
Apparently simple, this premise hides a reflection as hilarious as it is sharp on the inanity of an entertainment industry which puts its audience to sleep, the arrogance of a certain cultural elite towards the people and their definition of art, and the fiction that the latter tells itself to justify its mediocrity.
In a sober production which leaves plenty of room for the expansion of his ideas and the talent of his actors, Quentin Dupieux mixes in barely 67 minutes all the discomforts which are currently shaking the cultural environment, and which are bringing forward the debates that have taken different forms over the centuries, about elitism, subjectivity, accessibility and the social mission of art.
In the title role, Raphaël Quenard gives rise to moments of overwhelming candor and nonchalance, transforming an antipathetic, disturbing, even dangerous character into a touching and paradoxical being, without anything being revealed about his journey or his psychological state.
Everywhere, the finesse of the subject is confronted with constraints of time and means. This deprivation, failing to create a bomb effect, rather strives to tickle in us what we too often brush aside, frightened, perhaps, by the complexity that the moment of thought can take on. We laugh: at the characters, at the situations, especially at ourselves. All that remains is to salute the audacity.