The Second Act (2024)

Direction: Quentin Dupieux
Country: France

The comedic style of prolific French director Quentin Dupieux can often oscillate between the amusingly absurd and the frustratingly inconsequential. While Daaaaaali! (2023) fell short of convincing, The Second Act emerges as a surprising, satirical triumph. With its playful mise en abyme and elaborate form, the film delves into the world of cinema, where actors revolt against a script they deem mediocre. To make everything more insane, they are being directed by artificial intelligence, which also wrote the script.

The stellar and assured cast—Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel, Raphaël Quenard, and Manuel Guillot—are in complete control, and the story gains perspective and weight in their capable hands. The real fun of the film lies in its blurring of boundaries between representation and reality, leaving viewers guessing as the layers of fiction intertwine and collapse. Even lacking full dramatic meaning, it sneaks up on you. Yet, you should doubt everything you see and hear. 

Unapologetically, Dupieux skewers the egos and absurdities of the film industry, tackling issues such as homophobia, technology's encroachment on creativity, and the tension of strained relationships—all with his trademark irreverent humor. The Second Act demands to be seen, preferably with an audience that doesn't know what it's in for. It’s the kind of cool and kooky narrative that leaves you walking out of the theater feeling like you've seen something special, even if you can't quite figure out what that ‘special’ was. 

The film owes everything to its gifted actors coping with the provocative ideas of a script that becomes a therapeutic trust exercise of their own. This ferocious, dichotomous masquerade is never boring.

The Beast (2024)

Direction: Bertrand Bonello
Country: France 

Bertrand Bonnello’s intelligent time-spanning love story, The Beast, is his best film to date and my favorite of 2024 so far. Blending sci-fi, romance, drama, and dystopian thriller elements with enigmatic tones, the film, based on Henry James’ short novel The Beast in the Jungle, results in an original and purely cinematic work. 

The non-linear narrative centers on the doomed love between Gabrielle Monnier (Léa Seydoux) and Louis Lewanski (George MacKay) across three different eras. In 1910, she’s a married pianist frequenting the refined Parisian artistic circles, and he’s an attentive, if cold, British admirer. in 2014, she’s a model living alone in L.A., while he’s an unstable 30-year-old American virgin tortured by rejection and frustration. The future, in 2044, is marked by absolute AI control and the availability of DNA cleanings to erase sorrows of past romances, though at the cost of possible loss of feelings. Each fragment is imbued with a tightly coiled sense of tension and repeated patterns: odd therapy sessions, consultations with clairvoyants, persistent anxieties, premonitions, and fears. An unbearable sense of loneliness also pervades. 

Structured with deliberate bewilderment, the film is a gallantly romantic and dangerously obsessive journey into past lives. It can fascinate us as much as get us lost. Cast and crew make the dramatic events believable, with Seydoux and MacKay delivering extraordinary performances, contributing heavily to 145 minutes of poignant, almost delirious complexity. 

With shades of David Cronenberg and David Lynch, the director of Nocturama (2016) and Coma (2022) gives us something special in a ferociously pleasurable film that deserves respect for its ambition. The Beast is what it wants to be: a slice of thought-provoking, nightmarish science fiction that rewards the viewer emotionally and visually.

One Fine Morning (2023)

Direction: Mia Hansen-Løve
Country: France 

In Mia Hansen-Løve’s romantic drama One Fine Morning, Léa Seydoux (Blue is the Warmest Colour, 2013; France, 2021) is Sandra Kienzler, a widowed, avid-for-love interpreter who finds herself at a serious emotional crossroads. She tries to cope with the anguish that stems from her father’s health deterioration and the joyful possibility of a new love. The film pulsates with desperate, even miserable passion as Sandra gets closer to Clément (Melvil Poupaud of Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale and Raul Ruiz’s Time Regained), a married old friend and cosmochemist who usually spends months away in Antarctica and the North Pole. They have one children each and their relationship is not without indecision and consecutive ups and downs.

Ingrained with melancholy and shot in 35 mm, the film doesn’t exactly take your breath away, but it’s not afraid to state that life can be often messy and unfulfilling. It’s a simple yet powerfully acted drama that flourishes because of the protagonists’ charisma. These two lonely souls manage to go beyond their existential ennui.

Hansen-Løve, who was partly inspired by her father’s illness and wrote the script when he was still alive, takes a more transparent approach in opposition to the more ambiguous tonalities of her last film, Bergman Island. One Fine Morning has a few floundering moments, especially those when illness is involved. And yet, with sorrowful tears in her eyes, Sandra keeps us connected with her irrepressible hope.

France (2021)

Direction: Bruno Dumont 
Country: France 

Crisis - whether in its emotional, spiritual or self-confidence forms - was always a favorite topic of French filmmaker Bruno Dumont. After making interesting statements with Humanity (1999), Hadewijch (2009) and Camille Claudel (2013), he became more and more playful and eccentric yet less shocking with titles such as Slack Bay (2016) and the TV mini series L’il Quinquin (2014, 2018).

His new lurid and lugubrious satire, France, digs at the manipulative circus of modern journalism with biting sarcasm, and can be nearly deadly serious in some observations. Despite having Lea Seydoux spreading charm all over as France de Meurs, a celebrated TV journalist who quickly goes from disguised cynicism to tearful melancholy, Dumont unmanaged a few aspects in the last third of the film, which is so giddy, it verges on ennui.

This cynical portrait entertainingly stabs the media, the country, and, in part, itself by walking a line that often blurs good and evil. It never takes a clear position either, just like its protagonist refuses to answer if she’s left or right wing. And how her empowerment suddenly crumbles with a trivial incident! Seydoux has never cried so much in her entire career. The war scenes are often risible, and despite using archive footage of president Emmanuel Macron to its advantage, a good editing would only make it better. France is a bold move but hardly a successful one.