There are few directors so uniquely attuned to the serious business of silliness as the French auteur of the absurd Quentin Dupieux. His movies have a preposterous plausibility. Take Deerskin, a thriller about a man whose jacket talks him into going on a killing spree, or Mandibles, a sad-sack buddy movie about two losers who find a giant fly in the boot of a stolen car, which also serves as an oddly touching study of male friendship.
Or his latest, Smoking Causes Coughing, which focuses on a group of vigilante crime-fighters named the “Tobacco Force” who are sent on a team-building retreat, but spirals into a freewheeling fractal pattern of stories within stories and offers a perceptive skewering of the simmering tensions and microaggressions between colleagues.
