Rainspotting - Cannes Film Festival, 2024

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Alberto begins the second day upside down, starting with the evening film, after the gala. Le deuxième act / The Second Act, dir. Quentin Dupieux, with Léa Seydoux, Louis Garrel, Vincent Lindon, Raphäel Quenard și Manuel Guillot. In the Palais du Festival, at the Grand Auditorium Lumière, a hall packed with a fully engaged audience. There was the full blown clapping for the production studios, then the ironic one for the Netflix partnership and only then silence, but just for a little bit, because the second act is after all a comedy. I had this film on my watchlist from the very beginning, even though I know opening movies are pretty commercial, meant to entertain and not much else, unsophisticated (though the dress code was still black tie...)

For me personally it's all love, but Louis Garrel acts the same film, from beginning to end, always. I don't know, maybe there's something phlegmatic, maybe it's his thing that makes him Garrel. Maybe it's because he's simply beautiful and why would he need to do anything else basically? The last time I saw him was in L'Innocent (he directed that one as well, fair enough) and I felt he was now here with the exact same emotion. I don't always like this feeling, but I also equally admire him for it. He's got a consistency that comes from just being himself. It's not that he doesn't act at all, but he does it so naturally, so matter-of-factly, as if you just bumped into him randomly, no, even better: as if you just bumped into him randomly and it was nothing special.

And I'm glad I started with this, because this movie is a multilayered cake. It's got a sequel name, but it isn't one. And that's a cool mechanism for building and then deconstructing certain expectations. It's a film about making film, with a lot of cute scenes, but also sometimes poking fun at the industry. It's built beautifully, sequentially, symmetrically, new conflicts are always born out of dialogues between two characters, they then don't get solved but instead become absurd, but not the chaotic kind. It's a kind, anthropocene sort of absurd, true to reality even though it negates it paradoxically. An absurd that builds and structures the humour in this movie very well.

For better or for worse, the characters by themelves haven't got much humour. Maybe only Manuel Guillot is truly funny, because he plays a waiter (an extra), but he has to be emotional the whole time and, of course, to pour wine with his hands shaking for one of the scenes in the movie.

Also in sequences, in waves, the unexpected appears. The bizarre happenings feel complete by virtue of their symmetry, or there's someone there in the background too keen to explain everything anyway. The flow of stranger and stranger scenes starts with a very straightforward status quo. The film's characters know they are being filmed. So we are about to see a mix of text and extratext (which is actually still text, because the extratext is in the text). But it's nice when the focus is on a perception of the characters this time. And also when it's done like this, straight away. It's pretty obvious there are much bigger surprises waiting when someone proclaims the allegory of the convention from the very beginning. It means the idea is not within that convention, there's something beyond that. A sort of shock value.

If we compare Le deuxième act with what Hazanavicius was doing, for example, in Coupez! - the nuances become very clear. In his beautiful madness full of zombies and fake blood, Hazanavicius doesn't so much do a critique of the industry, but rather he's just tripping balls in a hyper aestheticised way. And if does do it it's obvious that it's lighthearted. While in The Second Act there's a certain gravitas floating around, not necessarily a frustration, but more of a wink sent to a whole world (unclear to me whether superior or inferior.) What do we adjacently learn from a film which also answers the question 'Who is the best film director ever? Is it Andersen, is it Scorsese?' We learn that movies (shockingly) don't mean anything anymore. There's discussions about talent, work, discipline, experience. And the hall is very receptive, because the industry knows. It could also easily be a quasi-desperate tribute to the cliché. Or better, to the cliché of deconstructing cliché. Everything is meta. But that makes the characters cool, because you confuse them. And at a certain point they also superimpose. But this confusion is ours, because the movie is made for us and it feels as if dedicated the public. All characters emulate a conscious proximity towards us, perhaps a consciousness in itself.

About that rhetorical question about the best director, Garrel also throws a Tarantino at one point. He also, like Kurosawa beforehand of course, plays this game of space-time perception, introduces pluriperspectivism but not at all onthologically, but in an operational sense, using what one can work with: space and time. Like Pirandello used to do in theatre with chronology.

Hazanavicius, as I was saying, comes and gives us a well deserved refresh, but he says 'no, I'll play around with situations, fuck space time, that's fine.' Somehow similarly (if we think about the absurd), Dupieux says 'I'll play around with the craftsman, the industry craftsman.'

Is it worth asking what is original and what is hybrid, what's developed or changed or stolen? What matters is what really stays with us after we leave. As long as I liked Le deuxième act, what good would a second act of analysis do?

I go down a few rows to run through my day again, but backwards, as I mentioned. Now we're a bit in the past. We're now before Dupieux's film. We're going to the film. We don't know where the Orchestre entrance is, but we'll find out. We pass by Ciné de la Plage, where today there's Boyle & Welsh's restored Trainspotting. The long chairs are full, the sand is fine I guess.But I'm a bit annoyed I have to wait dressed in black tie resting on the concrete railing above the beach.

The rain grows from mezzo drizzle to forte downpour, I forget about the rain and I watch for the hundredth time Trainspotting for the first time. That's how I feel. It's like that love that doesn't let you get cold in the rain, but that's just an illusion when the next day you've got fever and everything hurts. But you're never gonna put the blame on that.

Anyway, I'm there. On the railing. And I look down, watching the other people. And that superb scene comes along when Renton isn't constipated anymore and he goes to the loo to get his cocaine out. Then he goes into the WC fully and arrives into some sort of ocean, swims a bit then gets out of the WC. Out of all scenes, during this one it started pissing down. You almost couldn't see anything. And in all of that I started crying and that basically warmed me up. I didn't want anything else in that moment. My wet suit was sticking to my skin and was hugging and embracing me like a whole culture of people who really love films does too. People who would do anything for them. But some warmth was coming from inside too. Or maybe the rain was getting warm, to be gentler with us.