THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
Quentin Dupieux shoots lighter and lighter films faster and faster, and Yannick, his latest fantasy, left as a surprise in the middle of summer, is immediately presented as a pure epitome of his cinema. Despisers will see only a new pochade, but Dupieux’s films have never aspired to greatness. On the contrary, its domain is rather the transitory: that of ideas caught in flight, executed on the spot, converted into aberrant fables or ferocious jokes. Yannick thus asserts itself as a “small form”, by opting for the closed door between the only walls of a Parisian theater.
That night we play The Cuckold, a vaudeville at the level of the daisies where three actors in flagrante delicto of cachetonnage (Pio Marmaï, Blanche Gardin and Sébastien Chassagne, delicious with overplay and pettiness) renew the eternal marital trio, leading to a few shy laughs in a sparse room. That’s when someone in the audience stands up to challenge the actors directly. His name is Yannick, he’s a parking attendant, he’s taken a day off to come from Melun, and he can’t stand it any longer, because he feels he’s been wronged by the show. So he says it loud and clear, with his local accent that contrasts with the theatrical register. And he does not hesitate to take hostage, pistol in hand, a representation of which he, too, felt captive, in an attempt to reformulate it from top to bottom.
For a little over an hour, the film ventures into this strange hiatus opened up by the interrupted performance. By intervening, Yannick contravenes, in fact, the golden rule of the theater, namely the symbolic separation of the stage and the room, and breaks the contract of passivity of the public, asked to be silent and to keep their opinion for later.
This title role of impediment to going around in circles leaves Raphaël Quenard, revealed in Dog of the breakage, by Jean-Baptiste Durand, the free rein to deploy his cheeky and plebeian character, here in a manic-depressive register sometimes bordering on autoparody. Dupieux starts from convention (the boulevard as a hollow aesthetic form, the theater as a place of social ritual), the better to suspend it and look within. The aborted spectacle creates a bubble of strangeness of those that the filmmaker likes: a zone of malaise and uncertainty where the characters struggle, as if locked up, and the fiction devours itself.
Social violence
Yannick is especially valuable in that it brings out, through its hero, the figure of the spectator, in general the great unthought of auteur cinema. And not just any spectator: the so-called “average” one, to whom Yannick, in addition to giving an incarnation, provides a generic first name. This statistical spectator who, for the first time, inside a film, makes his taste heard asserts himself as a subject. It is not a question of setting him up as a hero of the people-spectator.
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