Both drawn-out and deceptively simple, the trippy French comedy \u201cYannick\u201d re-imagines a hostage situation as a surreal and very slow-burning farce. It happens to take place in the middle of a bad stage play. The title character, played by Raphael Qu\u00ebnard, interrupts a bizarre, high-strung divorce comedy called \u201cLe Cocu,\u201d or \u201cThe Cuckold,\u201d which seems to be about an aggrieved husband (Pio Marma\u00ef) and his wife (Blanche Gardin), the latter of whom confesses to having a \u201cplatonic\u201d affair with some guy (S\u00e9bastien Chassagne) who suffers from \u201cgut trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n
At first, Yannick\u2019s a self-important nuisance. He stops the play cold just to submit his displeasure to both the three actors on stage and his fellow audience members. The play within the play\u2019s actors\u2014insecure Paul (Marma\u00ef), inconstant Sophie (Gardin), and insubstantial William (Chassagne)\u2014try to shoo Yannick away, but he won\u2019t leave. He pulls out a gun and uses it to make room for himself on stage. The gun is loaded, though that doesn\u2019t really matter. It\u2019s a lightly held symbol of power. Piggy\u2019s got the conch and he holds onto it for a weirdly long amount of time. <\/p>\n
In the movie, Yannick\u2019s relationship with his fellow audience members is never really clear. That exasperating and often amusing ambiguity is a specialty for the prolific writer\/director Quentin Dupieux (\u201cSmoking Causes Coughing\u201d), whose name has become synonymous with this exact sort of stoner-friendly shaggy dog comedy. Yannick\u2019s story, such as it is, has no firm shape. He shows up, takes up way too much space, and slowly turns the room against itself. The unspoken but usual rule of social engagement\u2014a half-empty theater audience pays to watch and passively receive whatever\u2019s presented to them\u2014is completely ignored. Eventually, Yannick forces Paul and his co-stars to re-do the play, only now it meets Yannick\u2019s particular standards. Some members of the theater audience express their displeasure with Yannick. He still gets a standing ovation in the end. <\/p>\n
Some early reviews of \u201cYannick\u201d have understandably described the comedy as \u201cmeta,\u201d and suggested that it\u2019s Dupieux\u2019s response to his critics. I\u2019m not really sure how that last part works, not only given where the movie ends up, but also the patience-testing lengths that Dupieux goes to get there. This is a proud timewaster of a comedy and it\u2019s pretty amusing as such. Yannick may initially seem obviously unsympathetic, but he winds up charming several audience members anyway. One of them offers to put him up for the night, and nervously adds that he doesn\u2019t seem like such a bad guy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Both drawn-out and deceptively simple, the trippy French comedy \u201cYannick\u201d re-imagines a hostage situation as a surreal and very slow-burning farce. It happens to take place in the middle of a bad stage play. The title character, played by Raphael Qu\u00ebnard, interrupts a bizarre, high-strung divorce comedy called \u201cLe Cocu,\u201d or \u201cThe Cuckold,\u201d which seems …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[33,45],"class_list":["post-1289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comedy-movies","tag-comedy","tag-drama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}