Rendez-Vous ’25: The Second Act

Is it personal for these characters, or do the thesps playing them just hate their screenplay? Maybe it’s a little of both. Either way, it will be a rocky stop-and-start shoot in Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act, which screens during this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

Guillaume Tardieu does not think much of the man dating his daughter and he likes the actor playing him even less. He makes that clear whenever he breaks character, which is often. He is relatively okay with Florence Drucker, who plays his daughter, probably because she is a pretty big star. Regardless, he is much more interested in the upcoming Paul Thomas Anderson he claims he just signed onto.

Second Actis sort of meta, but much less so than many of Dupieux’s previous films. Reality and the film production are supposed to blend together as the actors break character and the fourth wall. However, it is way too easy to tell who is talking, actor or character. That means no bending of minds, let alone blowing them. It all just plays out like an extremely uncomfortable “making of” feature.

Quentin Dupieux’s Daaaaaali!

You could almost say Salvador Dali was the Andy Warhol of the 1920s and 1930s. The idea an artist could be a multimedia celebrity pretty much started with him. Perhaps more than anyone else before or since, he lived his life like it was performance art. Fittingly, Quentin Dupieux examines Dali’s eccentricity and self-promotion in Daaaaaali! (another film to make you grateful for the control-C copy function), which opens today in New York.

When you understand the title, you understand the nature of the film. Reportedly, each “a” in Daaaaaali!, represents one of the thesps who were supposed to play him in the film (apparently, Dupieux has one “a” to grow on). It is sort of like his I’m Not There, but it is more playful, subversive, and dare we say it . . . surreal. The five do not merely play Dali at different stages of his life. They often switch off mid-scene.

Yet, there’s more, including a storyline—at least more than most Warhol films ever had. Judith Rochant is a journalist (or sometimes a barista) who needs an interview with Dali to take her career to the next level. However, he will not waste his time if cameras are not present. Fortunately, Jerome the producer is willing to fund a documentary sufficiently grandiose to satisfy Dali monumental self-image.

Of course, each attempt to film Dali leads to disaster. In most cases, it is largely or entirely his fault. He can be difficult, especially when he is a guest at a dinner party. Yet, in his defense, the dream a boorish priest insists on telling him literally never seems to end. Whenever, it seems to conclude, it turns out to be another false stop that restarts the unending cycle.

Daaaaaali! never claims to be accurate with regards to anything, but it is much truer to the spirit of Dali’s work than Mary Harron’s Daliland. It is also slyly inventive in a low-tech kind of way, like the early scene of Dali walking down an infinitely long corridor towards the room where Rochant hopes to interview him.

Dupieux’s Yannick

Everyone is a critic, right? And that is our right, since we buy our tickets. That is certainly how a extremely socially-awkward parking lot night watchman sees it. However, he will take things a step further, by holding the cast and audience hostage, so he can re-write their play in Quentin Dupieux’s Yannick, which releases today on Mubi.

The truth is Yannick is not wrong about the mediocre sex farce he refuses to quietly sit through. Watching it in English subtitles probably does not help, but the jokes are still corny sitcom-level material. Not surprisingly, the sparse audience is only half-heartedly laughing. That is why so many do not object when he interrupts.

At first, the three players treat Yannick like a heckler. They almost convince him to leave, but when the diva-ish Sophie Denis starts mocking his complaints regarding his fifteen-minute walk and forty-five-minute bus commute to arrive at the theater, he pulls out a gun. After commandeering a laptop from a likely perverted patron, Yannick starts writing his own pages for them to play.

Compared to his previous weird and wacky output, Yannick is by far Dupieux’s most realistic and grounded film to-date. In our current world, where people regularly get accosted on-stage (even during the Oscars), something like this could very well happen. However, Yannick is definitely way out there—in a manner that is very unique to himself (or at least we can only hope).

In fact, it is rather overstating matters to describe the film as meta. There are maybe ironic parallels when the themes of jealousy that drive the corny play-within-the-film resurface during the hostage crisis. Perhaps understandably, Denis’s leading man, Paul Riviere, starts to resent Yannick apparently winning over many in the audience. Stockholm Syndrome will be a factor, probably because the original play was so bad.

Yannick has been Dupieux’s biggest box office hit in France, but Mubi is a good distribution fit for it in America, given its limited running time. It barely exceeds one hour, or comes up just shy of sixty minutes, if you exclude the closing credits. Frankly, the shorter, concentrated format suits Dupieux’s eccentric sensibilities. The audience can enjoy Yannick’s absurdity, before the full implications of his actions kill the vibe. You can only sustain Stockholm Syndrome for so long.

Quentin Dupieux’s Smoking Causes Coughing

Grown adults who wear spandex richly deserve to be mocked. Unfortunately, satire has been choked unconscious by woke social justice warriors, just as the superhero genre peaked. Hollywood no longer has defiantly rude satirists like Mel Brooks. The closest we can get is the post-modern bizarro wackiness of Quentin Dupieux, from France. Whenever a rubber-suited monster attacks, the Tobacco Force is there to stop them in Dupieux’s Smoking Causes Coughing, which releases this Friday in theaters and on-demand.

Usually, the fab five can rely on their marital arts skills to defeat the human-sized kaiju they fight. However, when all else fails, they can call on the carcinogenic compounds for which they are named, to give their foes an immediately fatal dose of cancer. Benzene is the oldest, so he considers himself the group’s leader. Mercury is a family man, whereas Menthanol is a luckless loser with the ladies. Ammonia is the baby of the team, whereas Nicotine carries a torch for their boss, Chief Didier, even though he is a human-sized rat, with greenish slime oozing from his mouth.

After their last rocky encounter. Chief Didier orders them off on a team-building retreat. As they pass the time, they tell a series of campfire stories that are meant to be scary, but are really just indescribably bizarre and random, very much like Dupieux’s films. Unfortunately, while the Tobacco Force cool their heels, their intergalactic nemesis, Lezardin, is planning Earth’s final destruction.

In this case, a comparison to Brooks is quite apt, because sometimes Dupieux’s gags are riotously funny and sometimes they fall excruciatingly flat, but he keeps blasting them at the audience with a scattergun, regardless.

Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles

Manu and Jean-Gab plan to train their new pet to be an animal burglar, sort of like the old organ-grinder monkeys. However, Dominique is not a primate. She is a weirdly large mutant house fly. It is an unlikely scheme, but the randomness of the world is their greatest ally in Quentin Dupieux’s ultra-eccentric Mandibles, which releases today in theaters and on-demand.

Calling Manu a homeless beach bum would imply his life has more structure than it really does. Nevertheless, a dodgy associate recruits him for a courier job delivering a mysterious Marsellus Wallace-style valise to a client. Much to Manu’s confusion, the terms of the job require the case to be secured in the trunk of a car, so he naturally steals an old beater Mercedes. After picking up his crony Jean-Gab, they discover the mini-kaiju in the trunk.

Instead of completing their assignment, the two slackers decide Jean-Gab will train the fly to become their personal air-born thief. To do so, they need someplace where they can lay low. Initially, they invade the home of a desert hermit, but the knuckleheads destroy everything they touch. Fortunately, fate intervenes, when Cecile, an entitled party girl, mistakes Manu for an old high school flame. Her friends are not much charmed by the lads, who resort to plenty of door-slamming slap-stick and a fair amount of gaslighting to keep Dominique a secret from their hosts, especially Agnes, who shouts like a John Cleese character due to a brain injury. She really dislikes the new guests.

Mandibles is a return to form for Dupieux after the dour and cringey Deerskin. Mandibles is more like Wrong and Reality, which took delight in their lunacy. Even though Manu and Jean-Gab do some pretty terrible things, the film itself it bright, energetic, and upbeat. It is almost like the most surreal Seinfeld episode ever.

Gregoire Ludig and David Marsais are perfectly moronic and amoral as Manu and Jean-Gab. India Hair is earthy and somehow not annoyingly idiotic as the inexplicably dense Cecile. However, Adele Exarchopoulos might just give the performance of her career as the tragically abrasive Agnes (seriously, forget about the over-praised Blue is the Warmest Color).

Quentin Dupieux’s Deerskin

“Clothes make the man,” Mark Twain told us. In this case, they make a French loser obsessive and delusional. Georges turns outlaw after donning a vintage Davy Crockett-style jacket. Indeed, he is so taken with it, he wants it to be the only jacket in the world, which is fine by the jacket in French provocateur Quentin Dupieux’s Deerskin, which opens virtually tomorrow.

Apparently, Georges has gotten the boot from his wife, but he rebounds with the jacket. Unwisely, he blows all his cash on it, before he discovers his wife froze their joint account. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The deerskin fringe just called to him. Fortunately, the seller threw in an old digital video camera that will allow him to pose (dubiously) as a filmmaker while hiding out in a provincial tourist town, during the off-season.

Despite his cluelessness, Georges recruits Denise, the local bartender and an aspiring film editor, for his film project. She can tell he is an amateur, but his supposedly experimental footage appeals to her hipster sensibility—especially when he starts filming the murders his jacket tells him to commit.

It is rather baffling how a dreary misfire like Deerskin could be picked up for distribution when Dupieux’s drolly subversive Keep an Eye Out has yet to get a real American release. Frankly, the best things about Deerskin are composer Janko Nilovic’s Bernard Hermann-esque musical cues. Unfortunately, the playfulness of Dupieux’s past films (especially Wrong, Reality, and Keep an Eye Out) is largely missing this time around. Instead, Dupieux belabors tired themes of “toxic masculinity.” If you don’t know what that term means, it is the kind of swagger the G.I.’s had when they liberated Europe from fascism. Obviously, they look askance at that kind of “toxic” thing in France.

MUBI/My French Film Festival ’19: Keep an Eye Out

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 18^th on MUBI and via other platform partners of this year’s My French Film Festival.

Dupieux’s Reality: It’s Different from Other People’s Reality

Something about Philip Glass’s Music with Changing Parts brings to mind Torgo’s theme from Manos: the Hands of Fate. That is not a criticism. In fact, it is another reason why it works so well as the soundtrack to Quentin Dupieux’s latest mind-trip. Reality with get twisted up and bent over double in Dupieux’s ironically titled Reality (trailer here), which opens tomorrow at the IFC Center.

Her name is “Reality” and her hunter father just bagged a wild boar. Nobody believes her, but she knows she saw a blue VHS tape pop out of its stomach while her Pops was removing the entrails. She will duly retrieve that tape, but the director filming her story will take his sweet time before he lets watch it. His name is Zog and he is driving his French producer Bob Marshall to distraction with his cost-overruns. Marshall is the decisive type. He is fully willing to fund Jason Tantra’s horror movie if he can produce the perfect groan of misery to express its essence.

In between his groan sessions, Tantra works his day job as a camera man for a cooking hosted by a man in a rat costume suffering from phantom eczema. All that scratching is starting to turn viewers against him. Frankly, the viewing experience can be trying in Reality, as when Tantra accidentally takes his wife to see his film before he starts making it. Rather upset with the sound mix, he tries to stop the screening, so he can fix it in the future. Then things start getting strange.

As weird as Dupieux’s first act undeniably is, it is nothing compared to the lunacy that follows. Dreams and films will interrupt and fold back into each other, as each strange subplot doubles back and refers to itself. Edited by Dupieux (a.k.a. Mr. Ozio), Reality has an extremely complex structure mere mortals could not even begin to diagram.

Granted, Reality lacks the warmth and sweetness that made Wrong such an unexpected pleasure, but it is still a blast to watch Dupieux juggle an infinite number of balls in the air. Each new reverse is a thing of beauty onto itself. It is easy for actors to get overwhelmed in such an auteurist spectacle, but John Glover gives one for the ages as the supremely confident Zog. Alain Chabat’s Tantra is like an everyman from an alternate universe (and maybe he is), while Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder really looks like he is suffering from a nasty rash in that rat suit.

By now, you really should know within a 99.99 degree of certainty whether Reality is your cup of tea or not. If you’re not sure, go anyway, because part of Reality’s subversive fun is watching other audience members getting confused and upset. Highly recommended for Dupieux fans and connoisseurs of cult cinema, Reality opens tomorrow (5/1) in New York, at the IFC Center.

Wrong: Quentin Dupieux Gives Reality What-For

It is the story of a man and his dog, but do not expect Lassie from provocateur Quentin Dupieux, a.k.a. Mr. Oizo.  He cast off all logic-based constraints and was creatively liberated for it, to judge by the distinctively strange results in Wrong (trailer here), which opened today in New York.

Dolph Springer’s dog Paul has mysteriously vanished.  His neighbor is less than sympathetic, because he is too busy going mad.  He is not the only one.  Eventually, it seems Paul was kidnapped by Master Chang, a tripped out New Age guru, for reasons that defy conventional reason, but make perfect sense in this world.  Springer’s gardener, a pizzeria girl, and a detective also careen in and out of the film, in ways that cannot be explained in a lucid thumbnail description.

In his somewhat notorious Rubber (the killer tire movie), Dupieux came up with an eccentric premise and a clever twist, but seemed too hemmed in by the circumstances he created.  In contrast, throughout Wrong he allows anything to happen, whether it makes objective sense or not.  The resulting absurdity is quite entertaining to behold.

Jack Plotnick is a heck of a good sport.  For Wrong to work, he has to play it all relatively straight, while everyone else acts insane.  In fact, he brings an earnest sincerity to Springer that is rather endearing.  Prison Break’s William Fichtner clearly enjoys hamming up Master Chang’s wacked out Zen, while Alexis Dziena plays Emma from the pizza shop appropriately over-the-top, like a sweetly innocent version of Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest.

Wrong is stylistically surreal and subversive, but rather gentle in tone, which is why it works so well.  Unlike David Lynch’s Lost Highway, it never leaves viewers bereft of faith or hope.  Indeed, Springer is sort of an everyman model of stick-to-itiveness that is actually sort of refreshing.

Rife with postmodern gamesmanship and goofy sight gags, Wrong is definitely aimed at a hipster audience, but it goes down way easier than one might expect.  It is a funny, good natured film, recommended for the only somewhat adventurous as well as their more surreally inclined brethren.  It is now playing in New York at the Cinema Village.

Sundance ’12: Wrong

It is the story of a man and his dog, but do not expect Lassie from provocateur Quentin Dupieux, a.k.a. Mr. Oizo. He cast off all logic-based constraints and was creatively liberated for it, to judge by the distinctively strange results in Wrong (trailer here), which screens at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Dolph Springer’s dog Paul has mysteriously vanished. His neighbor is less than sympathetic, because he is too busy going mad. He is not the only one. Eventually, it seems Paul was kidnapped by Master Chang, a tripped out New Age guru, for reasons that defy conventional reason, but make perfect sense in this world. Springer’s gardener, a pizzeria girl, and a detective also careen in and out of the film, in ways that cannot be explained in a lucid thumbnail description.

In his somewhat notorious Rubber (the killer tire movie), Dupieux came up with an eccentric premise and a clever twist, but seemed too hemmed in by the circumstances he created. In contrast, throughout Wrong he allows anything to happen, whether it makes objective sense or not. The resulting absurdity is quite entertaining to behold.

Jack Plotnick is a heck of a good sport. For Wrong to work, he has to play it all relatively straight, while everyone else acts insane. In fact, he brings an earnest sincerity to Springer that is rather endearing. Prison Break’s William Fichtner clearly enjoys hamming up Master Chang’s wacked out Zen, while Alexis Dziena plays Emma from the pizza shop appropriately over-the-top, like a sweetly innocent version of Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest.

Wrong is stylistically surreal and subversive, but rather gentle in tone, which is why it works so well. Unlike David Lynch’s Lost Highway, it never leaves viewers bereft of faith or hope. Indeed, Springer is sort of an everyman model of stick-to-itiveness that is actually sort of refreshing.

Rife with postmodern gamesmanship and goofy sight gags, Wrong is definitely aimed at a hipster audience, but it goes down way easier than one might expect. It is a funny, good natured film, recommended for the somewhat adventurous. It screens again during Sundance today (1/26) and tomorrow (1/27) in Park City.

Dupieux’s Rubber

Quentin Dupieux thinks you’re stupid if you want to see his new movie (in a subversive way, of course). Indeed, fanboy insistence on some warped sense of logical realism in their genre entertainment is one of the targets in his cinematic provocation Rubber (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Robert is a discarded tire that mysteriously animates itself somewhere in the generic southwest. As it rolls along the highway, it discovers it can make heads telekinetically explode, if it starts vibrating with a purpose. It is boring out there in the boonies, so naturally the bodies quickly pile up. Basically, everyone who crosses his path is in for it, except Sheila, his (human) femme fatale, whom he begins to stalk. However, before we can say “not another movie about a serial killing Michelin with the shine,” Dupieux adds an additional meta-layer of absurdity. As it turns out, Robert and Sheila are being watched.

There is something undeniably appealing about Dupieux’s willingness to chuck the kitchen sink into Rubber, pipes and all. Unfortunately, he is about as contemptuously disinterested in the film’s internal logical consistency as Obama is in the events tragically unfolding in Japan—not very, not at all. As a result, the audience is constantly aware they are being played. Dupieux tells us so straight out through his mouthpiece, Lieutenant Chad, who constantly repeats the mantra: “no reason.”

Serving as his own d.p., Dupieux shot with the video function of an off-the-shelf consumer digital camera, with surprisingly professional looking results. Frankly, it puts the herky-jerkies of the Transformers franchise to shame. The animatronic effects are also nicely executed, but what can you say about a film when the best performance comes from a tire? At least Wings Hauser is able to walk the fine line, signaling he is in on the joke while maintaining a semblance of character relatively well as the “Man in Wheelchair.”

Despite his gamesmanship, Dupieux ultimately conforms to genre conventions when he leaves Rubber wide open for a potential sequel. Here’s hoping it’s in 3-D. Laudably inventive but too self-consciously knowing for its own good, Rubber opens this Friday (4/1) in New York at the Cinema Village.