French film “Yannick” is a little one-joke comedy film which may often amuse you with the increasingly absurd situation surrounding its main characters. Despite its rather short running time (67 minutes), the movie does as much as intended without wasting any minute of it, and then it makes a rather neat exit when the story seems to be approaching toward its inevitable finale.
The movie opens with the ongoing stage performance of a play inside some little theater in Paris. The play, which is incidentally titled “The Cuckold”, initially seems a bit interesting with the scene between the husband and wife in the play, but it becomes more evident to us that its three main performers are really trying hard to sell their characters in front of their audiences. As a matter of fact, there are only a handful of audiences in the theater, most of whom are mildly interested without much care.
And then one of the audiences suddenly interrupts the performance to the surprise of everyone in the theater. He is a plain working-class guy named Yannick (Raphaël Quenard), and he is not so pleased because he has to endure this rather mediocre performance instead of actually having a good time there. He attempts some earnest criticism on the play as well as its performance, but he does not get much agreement from his fellow audiences or the main performers, and then he is eventually demanded to leave theater for continuing the performance.
At first, Yannick seems defeated when he exits, but he somehow changes his mind later while determined to do something quite drastic. He returns with a gun in his hand, and nobody dares to object him this time, regardless of whether that gun is real or not. As holding both the audiences and the main performers as his hostages, he eventually demands the main performers to do something else instead of what they were supposed to do on the stage, and that certainly throws the main performers into more panic and confusion.
Now this setup surely requires you some suspension of disbelief, and the movie manages to sidestep some plot holes as cheerfully wielding its darkly absurd sense of humor along the story. Mainly because there are not many people in the theater besides the audiences and the main performers, Yannick can easily take over the theater quite easily, and the audiences and the main performers have no choice but to follow his demands without being not so sure about what is really going on around them. The audiences do not complain that much mainly because they have been rather bored during the performance, and some of them actually seem amused by how Yannick breaks the monotony of the performance. In case of the main performers, they all agree to indulge Yannick as much as possible, but, not so surprisingly, they come to see more of how impossible he really is as their new writer/director (Their original writer/director is conveniently absent, by the way).
Considering what he manages to write in the end, I should say Yannick is not a very good writer at all, but I must also admit that he is constantly fun and amusing to observe from the distance at least. During the second half of the story, he even attempts to ingratiate him with a number of audiences, and most of the audiences except one cranky old dude are more amused as coming to side with him more than before (Talk about the Stockholm syndrome!).
These and many other moments in the film are effectively presented under the deft direction of director/writer Quentin Dupieux, who is also known as “Mister Oizo” and incidentally serves as the co-producer/editor/cinematographer of the film. While it is mostly confined in its small, closed background, the movie never feels stuffy despite being shot in the screen ratio of 1.33:1, and his main cast members keep their appearance as straight as possible while not seeming to be aware of being on the joke of the film at all. Although the story begins to run out of its narrative momentum during its last 10 minutes, it still maintains its lightweight mood even at that point, and you will also get some extra laugh before the end credits roll.
While Raphaël Quenard is naturally a standout thanks to a number of juicy comic moments given to him, the rest of the cast members are also engaging in their solid ensemble performance. As the three main performers of the play in the film, Pio Marmaï, Blanche Gardin, and Sébastien Chassagne are often hilarious as their characters frantically try to cope with their increasingly complicated circumstance in one way or another, and Marmaï is particularly funny when his character happens to reach to a sort of breaking point around the climactic part of the story. In case of the supporting performers playing the audiences, they ably support Quenard and the other three main cast members, and their individual responses to their ongoing hostage situation certainly contribute more humor to the story.
On the whole, “Yannick” is a modest but interesting piece of work from Dupieux, who previously made several notable feature films including “Dearskin” (2019). In my consequential opinion, it could be developed further in terms of story and characters, but the movie tickled and entertained me enough while not staying out its welcome at all, and now I become more interested in checking out Dupieux’s previous works later.
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