Yannick (2024)

Quentin Dupieux's film making is odd to say the very least. The man himself is somewhat eccentric; in the UK you might know him best as his stage name, Mr.Oizo- the man who hit Number One in the UK chart back in 1999 with 'Flat Beat.' But more recently you'd know him as a film director. I missed his previous film, Smoking Causes Coughing (2022) but Deerskin made my top ten of 2020.

Yannick, his latest release, is one of the funniest films of 2024 so far. This isn't hugely surprising- Deerskin was about a man who loves his new jacket so much he decides he doesn't want anyone else to wear one so begins killing everyone he sees wearing a jacket, and Rubber (2010) was about a killer tyre.

Yannick is the titular character who, whilst part of the audience, interrupts a stage play early in the film to complain that he's not enjoying it, and that this isn't the way he wants to spend his sole night off work. When the lead actor essentially tells him to do one, Yannick argues with him, eventually drawing a gun and holding the (mostly empty) theatre hostage whilst he rewrites the entire play and forces the three actors to perform his reworked model.

The whole thing more or less takes place inside the theatre and is barely seventy minutes long, as is Dupieux's wont. Raphael Quenard is mesmerizingly hilarious as Yannick, a man who philosophically argues his points regarding his rights to enjoy the play itself whilst clearly not being the sharpest tool in the shed.

The play that he's interrupted, 'Le Cocu', we join after its begun at the film's inception, and I was laughing immediately because the play itself is funny. So the fact that Yannick has a problem with it is already funny, and as the film progresses the whole thing just gets more and more ludicrous, and- thankfully- amusing.

Certainly Dupieux's film unfurls like a play, and at sixty-seven minutes could be considered a one act production. But there's no need to stretch Yannick out anymore than Dupieux does, and he's without doubt a director that studios could take note of- at times you don't need to expand a production just for the sake of it. 8.3/10