The Second act © Chi-Fou-Mi Productions
This year’s Cannes Film Festival—the 77th—will open on May 14 with Quentin Dupieux’s absurdist comedy Le Deuxième Acte (The Second Act), starring Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel, and Raphaël Quenard. The film, which will be shown out of competition at Cannes, will debut in theaters in France on the same day.
Dupieux is one of France’s most prolific filmmakers, having made some thirteen features since 2007. His latest films, both from 2023, include Daaaaaalí, which played out-of-competition at the Venice Film Festival, and Yannick, a box-office hit in France and beyond.
In selecting Le Deuxième Acte to launch this year’s festival, Cannes officials called Dupieux a “filmmaker who embraces freedom in tone, form and subject … establishing the absurd as a genre in its own right and shaking up all the others – of which The Second Act is a perfect case in point!”
The film’s official synopsis hints at the plot: “Florence wants to introduce David, the man she’s madly in love with, to her father Guillaume. But David isn’t attracted to Florence and wants to throw her into the arms of his friend Willy. The four characters meet in a restaurant in the middle of nowhere.”
This is not the first time Dupieux will have shown a film at Cannes: others have included Smoking Causes Coughing, Rubber, Dawn, and Deerskin. Dupieux is noted for his frequent use of dream sequences in his films.
Greta Gerwig is serving as president of the jury for this year’s twelve-day festival, which runs from May 14-25. The full lineup will be announced by Thierry Fremaux on Thursday of this week. Among the films that will reportedly play this year include George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Vorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Babak Anvari’s Hollow Road, Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle, Gilles Lellouche’s L’Amour Oui, and Andrea Arnold’s Bird.
It’s also been reported that Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Megalopolis is a likely prospect for next month’s Cannes extravaganza.