Dans la nouvelle comédie de Quentin Dupieux, Yannick, a young night watchman who is a bit of an idiot, is annoyed by the terrible play he is watching and interrupts the performance with the intention of rewriting the play. A minimalist gem of cinema carried by the brilliant Raphaël Quenard.
On the stage of a half-empty Parisian theater, Paul Rivière (Pio Marmaï) and Sophie Denis (Blanche Gardin) fearlessly perform a laborious boulevard play, “The Cuckold”. Until one of the spectators, a certain Yannick (Raphaël Quenard), stands up and interrupts the performance.
As a night watchman in Melun, the young man complains about a show that bores him instead of entertaining him; a suffering made even more painful by the fact that he has cleared his evening and come from afar to attend the play. Mocked by Paul Rivière, Yannick returns armed and takes the actors and audience hostage in order to rewrite the play according to his own desires.
Driven by the desire to regain the freedom of his early feature films, Quentin Dupieux took advantage of the preparation of his next film, “Daaaaaali!”, to shoot “Yannick” in six days, with a meager budget, in the confines of a Parisian theater. Where others would have barely made a mediocre short film, the filmmaker of “Deerskin,” “Keep an Eye Out,” and “Mandibles” delivers a brilliant, exhilarating comedy, free from the weight of the film production system.
Moving away from the surrealistic delusions that characterize his previous films, Dupieux succeeds in a tour de force with this work of barely 69 minutes, both funny, profound, and disturbing, which manages to regularly avoid the traps that its concept laid for it.
From a computer whose password betrays the phallocratic tendencies of a member of the audience, to an old theater regular stuck in conventions, and including Sophie Denis, willing to do anything to save her skin, and Paul Rivière, a failed actor full of self-sufficiency and contempt for others, “Yannick” exposes a small theater of life that, quietly, raises real political, societal, and artistic questions.
Playing with the relationship between art and the audience (one might wonder who, between the play and Yannick, is holding whom hostage), delving into the question of class contempt, Quentin Dupieux shows the theater stage and the auditorium as an excluding social space. Yannick, a proletarian on the fringes of this Parisian society that draws a form of superiority from its culture, finds, for a moment, an existence within this world that makes him invisible.
The goal is not to affirm, in all demagogy, that the play he clumsily writes to replace “The Cuckold” is better, and that art is everyone’s business. What matters is to see, on Yannick’s face, an almost childlike joy in hearing the actors perform his words on stage, as if, through the show, he finds a reason to exist, an identity, a voice, simply.
And while Pio Marmaï and Blanche Gardin are impeccable in the duo of actors in “The Cuckold”, we mainly witness, astounded, the explosion caused by Raphaël Quenard in the role of Yannick. An actor who can make us laugh, make us uncomfortable, and move us, worthy of the prodigious talent of a Patrick Dewaere.
Rafael Loup/oeil
“Yannick” by Quentin Dupieux, with Raphaël Quenard, Pio Marmaï, Blanche Gardin. Currently playing in Romand theaters.
#Yannick #Quentin #Dupieux #prend #otage #société #spectacle #rts.ch
publish_date]
