Double Feature: You Meta Believe It (Keep an Eye Out & In Action)

Meta humor has been readily and happily embraced in the past thirty years or so. TV shows like The Simpsons were built on the idea that the characters on the screen were as aware of their two dimensional existence as we are. Movies following this trend can range from comedy, to horror, to horror comedy. Maybe lots of other genres too but those are the only ones I’ve watched. How meta can drama get? Are there meta dramas? Degrassi is pretty meta but that’s a soap opera, different vibe.

This double feature centers on the idea of movie making in and of itself. Both films are about performance and the blurred line between art and real life. One is bizarre and borders on the nonsensical; the other is a raucous gimmick, likewise bordering on nonsensical. That being said, each movie has an internal logic that ties the world together and, in the end, what seems like sheer insanity falls into some sort of recognizable shape.

Lead Feature: Keep An Eye Out (2021)

I recently covered this movie so I’ll send you to that review if you need a refresher on what took place. Basically, Fugian (Grégoire Ludig) finds a body, is brought in by the police for interrogation, and then realizes he’s considered a suspect. The world around him gets more and more ridiculous until it is revealed this is all part of a play that he had no idea was happening.

My read on this film, especially the scenes where Fugian is trying to explain what happened to the police inspector, is that it’s a farce about the farcical process of getting a movie made. The nature of the beast when it comes to a piece of work like a movie is that it’s always going to be a committee process. There are so many people and moving parts to listen to and take into consideration. For a director like Quentin Dupieux who has a tendency to make films that are on the wackier side, it’s probably hard to paint the visual picture for someone who’s not inside his head. Explaining the outlandish or allegorical points – a living tire with the ability to explode people’s head for instance – might prove to be a challenge, one that is as frustrating for the director as it is for anyone he’s trying to convince to bankroll his project.

Aside from the reveal that this is all a play, the most meta scenes in Keep An Eye Out are the fictional memories involving Fugian and the inspector’s wife. Both characters know that they’re made-up shadows walking through events that didn’t happen. They are aware of their unlikely existence yet unsure of why they’re here and what they’re supposed to do. Such is life, eh?

The characters in Keep An Eye Out are aware of what is going on, though Fugian and the audience don’t know that until the end. Even then, Fugian still seems to be unsure of what is real and what isn’t. Like many of Dupieux’s works, the main concept is spiraled in layers, most of them fairly self aware. A plot about finding a body but that’s actually about creating commercial art requires a level of meta from both the filmmaker and the audience. We have to go into it knowing that the characters we’re seeing may or may not know exactly what’s happening. What makes Dupieux’s work continually interesting is that even when it’s fully immersed in the world of meta, we can never be sure where that humor and sensibility starts and stops.

Second billed: In Action (or A Gimmick To Make a Movie Over a Weekend With No Money) (2021)

In Action is a bit more straightforward than Keep An Eye Out, but it’s no less meta, that’s for sure. The jokes in the previous come from self-aware farce, while jokes in this film come from the increasingly absurd scenario playing out. This is a mixed media comedy with a cast of two. Some characters are shot only in shadow, even in integral scenes, to keep the cast small.

The main premise is two friends Eric and Sean (Eric Silvera and Sean Kenealy) who reconnect at the wedding of a mutual enemy. Sean and Eric went to film school together but both have fallen out of the world – or in Sean’s case, have lost their drive to be creative. When that flame is rekindled, both of them wind up frantically writing a script over email and shooting ideas back and forth to each other. What they don’t know is that their emails (that consist of heroism, bombings, and accidents happening at office buildings in Manhattan) have been flagged by a government agency, and the two of them are now being watched. They’re abducted from their homes and held against their will, expecting torture and death at the hands of their captors. Instead, rogue agents from the NSA want to use the plot of their action movie for a real life event, and are willing to do whatever it takes to keep Eric and Sean quiet.

I understand that how I’ve left it does not make it sound funny or meta but stay with me. First of all, there’s a lot of humor in how these two men rekindle their friendship, which happens mainly over the phone. Eric is a stay at home dad who refuses to curse even when his kids aren’t around and Sean is a foul mouthed instigator always trying to goad his friend into being dirtier than he is. The conversations covering plot and non sequiturs hold some of the best laughs in the movie. Plus, they took any excuse to show Eric with his shirt off, and boy, do I know why.

Where it gets meta is, well, just throughout the entire film as it’s a movie about making a movie, but the best parts are during the cartoon action sequences. This is not a big budget blockbuster (as you can tell by that last part of the title) so in order to get around those constraints, some of the more over the top sequences are done with animation. When Sean fantasizes about saving a gorgeous woman in a red dress from a helicopter about to crash into his office building (any idea why their emails might have gotten flagged?), we get to see a cartoon version of him – a stand in for how he sees himself and what he thinks he would do if this situation arose. This makes it all the funnier when the two of them are abducted and Sean admits that rather than fight heroically, like he always assumed he would, he “shit his pants.”

Another meta thing done for the reason of budget constraints is having the characters describe what gruesome action they’re witnessing off screen. Like the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula, Eric and Sean frantically call out the horrors they’re seeing in the lair of their captors, horrors that we not only know aren’t happening but are also never even believe as happening, like what we might see in a graphic scene from a violent movie. But it’s genuinely funny to watch them wide-eyed and screaming as they tell us what’s happening in front of them. Since we’re all on the same page (aka this is fake and they don’t have the money to make it real), the characters can get completely wild with the action.

The makers of In Action fully embrace the ‘gimmick’ of it all. They don’t see it as a bad word or a dishonest way to conduct themselves. A gimmick is a hook more than anything else, and using it here, they pull people in and set them up for what’s about to happen. Perhaps the most meta move of the entire film is that they get us ready to be underwhelmed (when was the last time something ‘gimmicky’ was worth writing home about?) then surprise us with a coherent yet silly movie that lands plenty of laughs and a few weird, wincing scenes. In a world gone meta, In Action is almost real.

In Action is available on all major platforms including Google Play, iTunes, and Fandango Now. It is distributed by Gravitas Ventures.