Only a pedant and a bore would complain that the last word of that title should be “cancer”. The phrase’s childlike naivety and irrelevance, apparently taken from an obsolete era when smoking was considered bad in the sense that eating cream cakes was bad, is a hint of what you’re in for: a fantastically silly and magnificently inconsequential comedy from French film-maker and former DJ Quentin Dupieux. For the life of me, I can’t think of another director right now who wants (or is allowed) to do just straight comedy for theatrical release, without having to buy the right to do so by also being unfunnily dark and disturbing.
Dupieux has put together something chaotic, disparate, entirely negligible yet oddly gripping and also funny. For all that this is very French, many points of comparison seemed to me Anglo-Saxon. “Smoking causes coughing” is like one of Tristram Shandy’s opinions. Dupieux is renowned, or notorious, for his throwaway zaniness and adventures in surreal whimsy, and has collected a fanbase along the way for movies such as Deerskin and Incredible But True. Smoking Causes Coughing is I think his best yet, and the fact that many people are going to find it intensely annoying is in fact one of its comic effects.
It is theoretically a portmanteau film, a collection of short stories with an overarching narrative device, but this is to overstate its structural soundness – it’s more rickety than that. In modern-day France, a team of superheroes called the Tobacco Force do battle with bizarrely rubbery monsters. These warriors of virtue are named after the constituent ingredients of cigarettes: Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi) and Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra). Wearing costumes and helmets, like a cross between the Power Rangers and Daft Punk, they kill these evil beasts by surrounding them and blowing their individual vapours which combine to form fatal cigarette smoke.
Their controller is a rat called Didier (voiced by Alain Chabat), with an unsettling resemblance to Flat Eric, the puppet created by Dupieux in his earlier career making music videos and TV commercials. After slaying the kind of dragon-creature that Captain Kirk once faced on a distant planet, the team are curtly informed by Didier that they have to retreat to a special training centre to regroup mentally and spiritually, ready for the upcoming war with a new villain: the Emperor of Evil, Lizardin (played by veteran Belgian comic Benoît Poelvoorde). Once at the camp, the team gather around the fire and tell each other scary stories, and these bizarre and extraneous pieces of directionless nonsense are tensely dramatised.
The cumulative effect is very pleasurable. The film has got some Python, Douglas Adams, Charlie Kaufman and also John Waters and Ed Wood Jr in it; it’s also possible that Dupieux has seen Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled. You might find yourself thinking at one stage of the crew aboard the Nostromo in Ridley Scott’s Alien, or even Tony Soprano’s haunted relationship with Big Mouth Billy Bass, his malign talking fish. And yet this film is also entirely distinctive. Perhaps, like Adam McKay, Dupieux will move away to more solemnly intended material. For now, thankfully, he’s keeping it immature.
• Smoking Causes Coughing is released on 7 July in UK and Irish cinemas, and is available on digital platforms in Australia.
