Can any line from The Second Act be taken at face value? Not really. “I should never have made this film,” confides Florence (the starry Léa Seydoux) just before the half-way mark. It's just another line from a script.
The film’s working title had originally been the heavily ironic À notre beau métier (which translates as "to our beautiful profession"). Writer-director Quentin Dupieux has Seydoux and her co-stars Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel, and Raphaël Quenard playing actors cast as actors who constantly criss-cross between the roles they are supposed to be portraying – in a fictitious film being made on a deserted airfield in the Périgord Noir – and their star identities.
This follows a long tradition. The “play within a play” is a rich seam in Francophone culture: think back to Genet’s The Maids or Beckett’s Endgame. The device is constantly used to re-model the power relationships between characters. Audiences need to be on their toes as they play guessing games about where the boundaries exist between the “real” and the “acted”.
Dupieux knocks this conceit about and has some real fun with it. Since Seydoux, Lindon, Garrel, and Quenard are fixtures on French screens, Dupieux's sense of mischief leads him to riff on their celebrity. So we find Guillaume (Vincent Lindon) donning a fake moustache, which connects the actor instantly to his celebrated role as the jobseeker Thierry in The Measure of a Man. David (Louis Garrel) is typecast from the start as broody, Parisian, and oh so complex. Before much has happened at all, he has already instigated a complex love triangle to set in motion the drama of the film they are making. Though Florence is besotted with David, he’s indifferent to her and tries to palm her off on his confused friend, Christian (Quenard), even bringing him to attend the first lunch with Guillaume, David's prospective father-in-law.
At the lunch, David (Louis Garrel, pictured above) disappears from the table. It’s nothing to do with the plot of the film being made – he's off to call his agent. It is just one of several reminders of the Netflix series Dix Pour Cent (Call My Agent). The Second Act frequently addresses the vanity and emptiness of the acting profession. If social niceties between the characters are observed in the fictitious film, the gloves are off when they switch to their screen personas. Jealousy, carping, and competitiveness take over. Yet in the final sequence, a tracking shot of a dolly track presumably signifies that it is the neglected artisans who actually make films rather than vainglorious actors.
Dupieux tests the limits of how savage and uncaring actors can be to each other by having Guillaume make light of homosexuality and bisexuality. David and Christian mock a waiter whose shaking arm looks as if it might indicate a degenerative neurological disease. Florence threatens to destroy Christian’s acting career when he attempts to kiss her. Yet if this is all done for laughter, does it matter?
As Dupieux said in a panel discussion at Cannes last year, "If there wasn’t humour, you’d shoot yourself.” The pinnacle of absurdism concerns the sub-plot in the film within the film. It is being directed not by a person, but by AI (which held Seydoux in thrall in The Beast). The nearest the actors can get to this entity is a junior employee who holds up a laptop for them so they can hear an avatar explain that they are having their wages docked for over-runs in expenditure.
After a long conversation with David, Florence has the last words in the film. “I prefer listening to the sound of silence. Reality is reality. Full stop.” But what does this portend? Like everything else in The Second Act, it leaves us guessing.
