Omnia mala exempla ex rebus bonis ortasunt.
Sallust, Catilinaria, 51.27INTRODUCTION: STAGING SCRIPTS
In Quentin Dupieux's 2018 movie Au Poste ! (English title: Keep an Eye Out), Louis Fugain, the protagonist, calls the police after finding a corpse in a pool of blood in front of his apartment building one night. Police detective Buron then inflicts on him an ordeal in the form of an overnight interrogation, asking him increasingly surreal questions. The film narrates the confrontation by continuously breaking the common rules of cinematic logic. In the filmic visualisation of Fugain's answers to Buron, the suspect comes across some of the characters that he has met at the police station, a feature that contradicts the chronology of narration; at one stage, the former can even clearly visualise the story that the latter is telling him. He can also sometimes be seen by the detective when it is his turn, Fugain’s, to narrate. Eventually, when the interrogation seems to have reached a dead end, the police station suddenly turns into a theatre stage, and Buron and the other police officers reveal themselves to be in fact actors and actresses, applauded by the audience at the end of their enacting the interrogation. Fugain is, therefore, relieved but, after having dinner with the whole theatre troupe in a local brasserie, he finds out to his despair that he is going to be arrested again so as to be forced to participate in the same staged interrogation the following day. His legal ordeal, turned into a theatrical show, might never come to a definitive end.
The movie explores a short-circuit between reality and representation: on the one hand, Buron seems to suspect Fugain for real, with real consequences; for instance, the suspect loses his freedom to leave and go home. On the other hand, Fugain is actually turned into the involuntary protagonist of a play whose destiny is to be put on stage over and over again, representing an interrogation that will never cease either with his condemnation or with his acquittal. The continuous interferences between the interrogation and the visualisation of the stories shared through it prepare the revelation of this overlapping between the two dimensions of reality and representation.