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.
Dupieux dismisses the outlandishness of his plot devices with a Gallic shrug and a casually laconic style of film-making, encouraging us to find something unexpectedly relatable underneath the deadpan oddness. However, together with the no-shits-given shoddiness of the look of the pictures – bleached out film that has the appearance of footage found in someone’s shed; 50s B-movie-style special effects – this deliberate oddness means that Dupieux doesn’t always get the credit he deserves as one of the more original and distinctive directors around.
Unpredictable, digressive, looping and parenthetical in structure, Smoking Causes Coughing is one of the most formally daring and unexpected films of the year. It’s probably one of the funniest. And it’s almost certainly the only one to be partially narrated by a fish.
