Quentin Dupieux is one of the vanishingly small number of film-makers on the non-Anglo-American distribution circuit who really is interested in – and allowed to make – straight-up comedy, albeit flavoured with melancholy or violent absurdity. For me, only Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern are comparable. Aki Kaurismäki, for example, is different; although gently and wonderfully comic, his films don’t try to hit the laugh lines in the same way.
The prolific Dupieux has now created a 67-minute sketch, a one-act cine-play about a mediocre Paris stage company performing a dinner-theatre comedy called The Cuckold to a bored, half-empty house. Just as they are grinding through their tired old routines, a guy called Yannick (Raphaël Quenard) stands up in the auditorium and announces that this so-called comedy is making him sad and he wants his money back. The dumbfounded actors start mocking this jerk but Yannick pulls a gun, clambers on to the stage and demands a word processor and printer so he can write a better play for them. Is he a radical hero for disrupting mediocre bourgeois culture? If this is a hostage situation, he says, well, so is sitting through a bad play.
