Lights, Camera, Make It Pop: A Review of Quentin Dupieux's Keep An Eye Out

Once, while working on a play in London, the director of said play and I decided to see a sketch comedy showcase. There was one sketch where a man dressed as a clown tried to perform his act while a woman off-stage shouted vague instructions like, “funnier!”, “cheerier!” and “do it better!” My director friend didn’t quite get it, but having spent the past few months co-authoring a work for someone whose main feedback was “make it pop,” I knew exactly what was going on. In the world of art made for public consumption, we often get critiques and suggestions that are essentially useless. It’s not so easy explaining the point of having a vision to someone who only wants to see specific parts.

In a winding and surreal way, that’s essentially the crux of Quentin Dupieux’s Keep An Eye Out (2021). To me, Dupieux has the hallmarks of a typical and an extraordinary director all at the same time. He’s typical in the arthouse sense of making sometimes unreadable films filled with bizarre symbols and non sequiturs. But he’s extraordinary for always having an impeccable layer of humor in a genre where pretension can easily take over.

Dupieux’s latest, originally released in 2018 and now freshly rereleased in the U.S., is a bizarre and surreal dream but also perhaps the most straightforward of his movies. But in the typically confusing world of Dupieux, making sense does not always land you where you think it would.

Fugian (Grégoire Ludig) finds a body one night, and calls the police. He is then brought in for questioning by an aggressive police chief, Commissaire Buron (Benoît Poelvoorde), who is behaving as if Fugian has something to hide. Throughout the course of the interrogation, as co-workers stream in and out, the flashbacks Fugian uses to explain what he saw become increasingly jumbled – shifting through time and sometimes including people Fugian has yet to meet.

Spoilers to follow: When one-eyed detective Philippe (Marc Fraize) is alone in the room with Fugian, he insists on showing Fugian his police badge despite the man’s protests. Retrieving the badge, he trips and impales himself in the other eye and dies. Fugian, already under suspicion for the body he originally found, hides Philippe in a locker in the office and proceeds to farcically keep the accident under wraps until the very end. Suddenly, a previously unseen audience starts applauding. The various people who have come in and out of the office join Fugian and Buron on what we now see is a stage. They bow, Fugian eventually following confused and frightened.

Later, the entire cast is eating a late dinner together and discussing their onstage choices while Fugian stares into the middle distance with the shaken look of a man who just escaped death. The movie ends with him and the actor who played Buron walking off into the Paris night, discussing the nature of acting.

While this movie is still very much in the realm of odd, it manages to wind back around to straight forward more often than not, even when the viewer feels like they’ve lost the trail. The first shot of the film is Fugian in a speedo conducting a pit orchestra that’s set up in the middle of a field. Once at the end of the story, this otherwise nonsensical image locks into place: if all the world's a stage then all the parts of the show have to happen. They might happen in a field and you might not be fully dressed because these are parts of the play, the act that we (and the French) call life.

At its heart, Keep An Eye Out is a mashing of the world of commercial art versus the world of personal art. Movies are in their own middle category, as they are by nature commercial, but can obviously also be a passion project for the person at the helm. Choices considered necessary by someone immersed in a work can seem frivolous or confusing for someone looking at the piece as a commodity to be sold.

A lot of visual information gets jettisoned past you, as with most of Dupieux’s work; a lot of rich, intertwining tangents that add to a larger picture of what it’s like to have a livelihood in a creative field. One scene with Buron meeting up with his teenage son and eating a hot dog is funny on its own, then becomes fodder for the cast dinner conversation and turns into a real question of how to fully create the artifice of life. Fugian and Philippe’s wife have sweetly romantic, albeit innocent, flashbacks to a memory that didn’t exist in other scenes, making you wonder if the old saying ‘life imitates art’ is even true after all.

This was probably my favorite Quentin Dupieux movie, not just because I found it accessible enough to show to other people, but because it’s so relatable. As someone who makes my living in the creative world, including performing, I confirm it can be a really unusual place. Throughout the movie, Buron questions Fugian’s motives and choices in a way that sounds more like a critic than a detective. It becomes increasingly obvious that the dialogue between the two is what Dupieux has to hear everytime he tries to make a movie. Fugian is told what people like, want, and expect. Every preference he has is mocked, and he finds himself defending things he thought he had no need to defend.

Like many of the films I write about, I can’t promise it’s for everybody, but I do suggest giving this (along with the rest of Dupieux’s work) a shot. Keep An Eye Out is funny enough to keep most people engaged though I’d be remiss if I didn’t add the disclaimer that you need to go into it being prepared to laugh at anything. A one-eyed, recently dead man walking around with a badge sticking out of his only good eye is hysterical, I promise, but only if you’ve decided to come along for the ride. Similar to something like The Greasy Strangler, this is a movie that will make you laugh even though sometimes you’re not sure why. Which works for me. I never know why I’m laughing anyway.

Keep An Eye Out is distributed by Dekanalog.