The Second Act

In 2022, the Cannes Film Festival kicked off with Final Cut (Coupez!), a quirky ode to the collaborative efforts of filmmaking, despite how messy its entanglements can get. At first glance this year’s opening act feels like an evil, naysaying twin thereof – and not just because Raphaël Quenard stars in both pictures.

Joined by Vincent Lindon, Léa Seydoux and Louis Garrell, the celebrated French quartet play actors struggling on the set of The Second Act: the world’s first feature written and directed by artificial intelligence. No matter whether they fight over social standing, queerphobic remarks or the insignificance of art on a burning planet, the machine remains indifferent to their off-screen drama and merely re-calculates a deduction from their fees for any additional work their behaviour requires in postproduction.

The lines between their characters and their character’s characters are progressively blurred throughout its runtime of 85 minutes, offering a metatextual discourse expanding but not limited to the subjects broached in their dialogue. Still, what stands out is a quite innovative contribution to the ongoing debate of so-called cancel culture. Through the juxtaposition with the insensate entity, the importance of allowing humans to err is highlighted – not in order to be purposely hurtful towards others, but because this is the main difference between our species and an algorithmic calibration.

Image-wise, The Second Act, unfortunately, has less to offer. Despite its outstanding cast, the walk-and-talk scenes quickly become monotonous, the cuts between a number of two-shots revealing the flaw in director Quentin Dupieux’s undisputed prolificness (it is his fifth film in the past two years).

The title also hints at the project’s deconstruction and rejection of the traditional three-act structure and a drawback of this experimental approach is that the movie feels unfinished. Instead of a briskly paced feature, the outcome feels more like a bloated short film.

Nevertheless, the dark comedy revelling in self-deprecation of the film industry and cherry-picked actors make The Second Act certainly worth watching.

Selina Sondermann

The Second Act does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival 2024 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.

Watch a clip from The Second Act here: