Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Quentin Dupieux
Starring: Gilles Lellouche, Anaïs Demoustier, Vincent Lacoste, Jean-Pascal Zadi,
Oulaya Amamra, Adele Exarchopoulos
Spare a thought for the poor PR folk who have to come up with ways to
market the films of absurdist auteur Quentin Dupieux. The
marketing peeps have focussed on selling his latest,
Smoking Causes Coughing, as a satire of the superhero genre. That's understandable, given
the perennial popularity of the genre, but it buries the lede.
Smoking Causes Coughing is indeed a spoof of superhero
movies, but it's also a horror-comedy anthology, one whose tone falls
somewhere between EC Comics and the Zucker Brothers.
The superhero storyline acts as the wraparound as we're introduced to
the Tobacco Force, a quintet of Z-grade Power Rangers, with each
member possessing the power to wield a key ingredient of cigarettes as
a weapon. There's Benzène (Gilles Lellouche), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Mercure (Jean-Pascal Zadi) and Ammoniaque (Oulaya Amamra). Dupieux appears to be poking
fun at the sort of anti-smoking campaigns that were popular during his
childhood, in which half-baked knock-offs of popular comic book
characters would take down baddies associated with spreading the
habit. Sometime genuine superheroes would come up against such foes,
as in Superman's antagonist Nick O'Teen.
We first encounter the Tobacco Force through the eyes of a young boy
who stumbles across the Force in action battling a giant turtle. The
turtle is a stuntman in a rubber suit, the kind of villain William
Shatner used to scrap in the original Star Trek series,
or that might be seen stomping Tokyo. Either way, it's a delightful
reminder of a more innocent era, a more fun time, and serves to point
out how boring superhero movies have become in the past few decades as
they chase an adult audience.
After struggling to take down the turtle, the team is contacted by
their boss, a Roland Rat-alike puppet named Chief Didier and voiced by
Alain Chabat, who sends them off to a lakeside retreat in order
to strengthen group cohesion. An amusing sub-plot sees both Nicotine
and Ammoniaque flirt with the rather vile creature, who compliments
their breasts while drooling some odd green fluid from his fangs, and
who always seems to have another woman in his bed.
As the Tobacco Force settle around a campfire, the anthology segments
are introduced in the form of stories spun by the various members. One
tells of a quartet of friends who visit a nearby Air BnB home, where
one of them finds a "thinking helmet," a clunky welder's helmet that
gives its wearer a new sense of clarity. Donning the device, Agathe
(Doria Tillier) suddenly realises how much she despises her
husband and their friends and sets about murdering them with various
household implements. Dupieux cleverly apes the slasher genre's POV
shots as we view the action through the postbox-like slot in the
welder's helmet, and Adèle Exarchopoulos has fun in the role of
final girl, a self-obsessed young woman who can't resist livestreaming
her own demise.
Next up is a very brief tale of environmental terror told by a young
girl who appears out of nowhere and subsequently vanishes. That tale
features a fish, which is later caught by the team and begins to tell
its own horror story while it fries on a grill. This leads to the
movie's highlight, an absurdist tale of a young man caught in a wine
press that is as hilarious as it is ludicrous. The segment is
wonderfully played by David Marsais as the victim and
Blanche Gardin as his aunt. As the latter's attempts to free
her nephew continually backfire, dragging him further into the
machine, the former insists on apologising, claiming "It doesn't hurt
so bad, really." The segment is a riot throughout, capped off by a
classic EC Comics denouement.
The haphazard nature of Smoking Causes Coughing's narrative and its brief 76 minute runtime suggest it's made up of
fragments of ideas Dupieux had for stories and vignettes that couldn't
be stretched to feature length (not that that's a consideration that's
stopped him in the past). In this way it's sort of the cinematic
equivalent of an album like Bob Dylan's Self Portrait, a bunch of odds
and ends thrown together in the hopes that fans of the artist will get
something worthwhile from the endeavour.
If you're a fan of Dupieux - and frankly, why wouldn't you be? –
there's plenty to keep you amused here, and that wine press segment
ranks among his finest work. If the French filmmaker's work generally
leaves you bemused, you should probably sit this one out. If you're
completely unfamiliar with Dupieux, this might be a good place to
start, as it will clue you into his off-kilter sensibilities without
testing your patience too heavily.
Smoking Causes Coughing is on
UK/ROI VOD now.
