The Act French Festival, which sprawls out over the city for most of the fall, is a very wide, and porous, umbrella. Participating shows may have only a passing whiff of Frenchiness: The roster includes English language productions and beaucoup readings, but only the occasional full-French performance. One of these rare imports, now at the Kitchen, is actually Austro-French, but, just as in cooking, a little Gallic can be plenty.

“Big: Episode #2 (Show/Business)” is a highly colored riff on our product-oriented culture. Superamas, a group whose work slips between multimedia, dance, and theater, borrows from film, their own wacky video collection, and the top 10 songs on every teenager’s iPod, in efforts to deconstruct our notions of exploitation.

“Show/Business,” starts with the male members of the company onstage, playing air guitar (and air keyboards, and etc.). As they mention during the show, Superamas has gotten plenty of attention from swanky dance festivals – but their preshow groove proves it isn’t for choreographic brilliance. Then they launch into one of their two “scenes,” set bits that they return to again and again. Both are mimed with cheerful voice-overs; both emphasize cartoonish, exaggerated gestures.

The first, a scene at a cosmetics counter, features two guys trying on makeup with their buddy, a gorgeous stewardess. After she recommends a nice toner, Kelly (Elisa Benureau, actually of Air France) offers to model some underwear. Both guys give an enthusiastic thumbs-up. We see this scene a number of times – slowed down, in silence, with one actor missing, or with the two guys taking a break to make out. It’s entirely inane, shot in the style of a 1990’s Mentos commercial, with clips from the Ben Stiller movie “Zoolander,” to reinforce the tone.

Their second “scene” is far less playful. It has the same jokester tone, and the same pauses for bad unison dancing. But this time they’ve taken a slice of their own fund-raising lives – a meeting with an investor – and made it into something spectacularly cynical. Projected clips from Godard interviews emphasize that meeting pretty girls is a time-honored perk for directors, but the men of Superamas take it another step further. Putting Ms. Benureau through the full gamut of humiliation, they treat her like a new Nico – awkward, a nonperformer, but exploitable for her killer bod.

Superamas, despite treading a dangerous line between “commenting” and “taking advantage,”gets away with this through sheer high spirits. Reveling in their goofiness, parading their one female member around in lingerie, the show seems like the smartest fratparty ever thrown in a downtown venue. Even some last-ditch attempt at cultural criticism, grumping about the “fashionalization” of our culture, can’t make this bit of fluff erudite. Party on!

***

Another Act French affiliate, “Take No Survivors,” at 59E59, fares rather worse. A two-hander by Gerard Bagardie (translated by Arnold Slater), it shoots wide while taking aim at reactionary politics.

A decade down the road, two women, one the president of France, the other a combat-booted leader of the youth movement, squabble over an incipient rebellion. Mr. Bagardie starts strong with a clever blend of contemporary reality (governments pandering to senior voters) and edgy predictions about our near future (youth revolting against taxes that only support the old). But he soon stifles his creation with a suffocating blanket of cliches. By the time both leaders declare “this business is murder,” you may be ready to take up arms yourself.

The production itself, set on a shaky looking set with even shakier actresses, shies away from real adrenaline. Life-and-death situations come and go, guns appear, and paranoia should be paramount. But in Elysabeth Kleinhans’s overly careful staging, even the outbursts obey the rules of etiquette. Neither of her actresses brings enough menace or charisma to bear – perhaps if they were dragon ladies, we would appreciate Ms. Kleinhans’s restraint. Instead, Ruthanne Gereghty and Corey Tazmania (as the oldie and the youngie respectively) complain instead of rage, whine instead of fight. In the future, apparently, regimes will end with a whimper.

“Big: Episode #2 (Show/Business)” until November 5 (512 W. 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-255-5793).

“Take No Survivors” until November 13 (59 E. 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, 212-279-4200).