Commissaire
Buron is the kind of cop who reminds us both the bumbling Inspector Clouseau
and the cypher-like postmodern detectives of Alain Robbe-Grillet are French. He
inspires little confidence, but he might just out Columbo Inspector Colombo,
while turning reality on its ear in Quentin Dupieux’s Keep an Eye Out (trailer here), which streams as
part of From France with Love, MUBI’s
showcase of films selected by the 2019 My French Film Festival.
Buron
is supposedly interrogating Louis Fugain, but his mind seems to be elsewhere.
In fact, he seems rudely disinterested in the civilian, but he still perversely
refuses to let the hungry civilian leave to get something to eat until he
finished his statement. Oh, those civil servants.
Initially,
we assume Fugain is there is a witness, but we eventually learn he is Buron’s
prime suspect. Alas, Fugain’s version of events is such an unlikely series of
Rube Goldberg events, it is hard to believe he made them up—unless, of course,
he did. This is a Quentin Dupieux movie, after all, so all bets are off. Inconveniently,
Fugain’s chain of unfortunate events continues beyond Buron’s field of vision,
which forces him to do some desperate improvising.
Although
Eye starts out as the smallest film
of Dupieux’s filmography, in terms of scope, it does not take viewers long to discover
how weird life is in Fugain’s world. We are talking even stranger than his playful
confections Wrong and Reality. Unless you are deeply steeped
in post-structuralist philosophy and the wacky excesses of contemporary pop
culture, Eye will be a real
head-scratcher of a viewing experience. It could even make older patrons’ heads
explode.
Hopefully,
they could still appreciate the bone-dry humor of Benoît Poelvoorde’s performance
as Buron. He manages to segue from clueless bumbler to sinister authoritarian
to apathetic shirker without breaking a sweat. Grégoire Ludwig maintains a
similarly weird, hard-to-peg consistency as Fugain, while Marc Fraize also
deserves credit for playing it scrupulously straight as Philippe, a rookie cop
with an impossible to describe eye affliction.
Frankly,
the police station setting and ostensive procedural narrative are highly
compatible with Dupieux’s gamesmanship. You can see his kinship with works like
Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound and
Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman,
but Dupieux has a flair for visual mischief that is all his own. That is what
makes his films so amusing. Recommended for fans of his surreal head-tripping
comedy, Keep an Eye Out streams
through February 18th on MUBI and via other platform partners of this
year’s My French Film Festival.
