Have you dreamed one day in the theater of telling the actors that they are bad? To get up from your seat and make them realize the extent of their mediocrity? Even more subversive, to compare their work to hostage taking, which shamelessly wastes your time and money? It is this fantasy that Quentin Dupieux stages in his latest film, Yannick, a concentrate of humor and banter largely carried by its main actor, Raphaël Quenard. The critics of the French press, which the idea has certainly itched on several occasions, seem to have appreciated this new farce from the director of Smoking makes you cough.
“In the theater, we don’t know. In any case, at the cinema, it had been a while since we had laughed so much”, enthuses Eric Neuhoff, in the columns of Figaro . It praises both the performances and the comic genius of Raphaël Quenard, for whom the film was written. The Grenoble comedian is “probably the greatest comic revelation since Bernard Menez”, judge Neuhoff.
At Liberation, it is the merits of a “simple” film that are praised, a film “rid of the wacky stuff and mischievous numbers that Dupieux’s cinema has long been unable (or wanted) to do without”. Does the director hold his best film? In any case, it tackles frontally an unthought of contemporary auteur cinema, notes Marie Klock. To see Quentin Dupieux “stage his worst nightmare, namely to bore the public, what is more with a genre, the theater of the boulevard, supposed to be pure entertainment, is a total delight”. “The filmmaker does not fail to question us about the nature of art and the place of the spectator”, abounds La Croix , who salutes a farce “as brief as brilliant” of which the director “has the secret”. Céline Rouden also praises Quenard’s acting, “alternately uncomfortable, disturbing then moving”.
“Disdain for class, vanity of the small world of so-called culture, madness lurking in each of us: Dupieux’s misanthropy is doing well, his sense of conciseness too”, salutes L’Obs for his part. Nicolas Schaller detects in this new feature film a connection with two other masters of cinema, Luis Buñuel and Bertrand Blier. Yannick is his “most readable film and serves as a manifesto for everyone to use for his method as an iconoclastic parasite in search of artistic naivety”. “Yannick is especially valuable in that he brings out, through his hero, the figure of the spectator, in general the great unthought of auteur cinema”, theorizes Mathieu Macheret in Le Monde. “A statistical spectator who, for the first time, inside a film, makes his taste heard asserts himself as a subject.”
To read also Raphaël Quenard, towards the heights
Télérama pushes the question further: “A suburbanite, the broken social bond, the feeling of humiliation, the exasperation which rises to violence: damn it, are we dreaming or is it politics?” The policy would indeed be present, according to the magazine, but “cunning”, because it does not take the side of staging a “clash between caillera and haves”. Quentin Dupieux has the elegance to confront “a guy from suburban France with a general soft stomach”. Or “a whole theater of present-day France” with almost cathartic virtues: “Dupieux translates resentment, fear, sadism, emptiness, the feeling of being poorly represented, of not being recognized. A world of the fake and the dreary, in which Yannick reinjects emotion, as the king of improvisation, as an illuminated showman”.
The only downside is the filmmaker’s devices, according to Thierry Chèze, from Première. “We have suffered for years watching him rest on his laurels in films with always brilliant ideas, always with a very strong cast, but always so frustrating in their execution”, explains the journalist. The film, too short, does without a conclusion which would have been appreciable, he believes. “We probably project too much each time on Quentin Dupieux and his cinema.”
