THE FALLING STAR - Mark Reviews Movies

The Falling Star, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 29, 2024

Comedy may be subjective, but even so, it's difficult to determine the joke of The Falling Star. Oh, its comedic intentions are pretty obvious, for sure. Writers/directors/stars Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon are working in the vein of broad genre parody, which is certainly commendable and appreciated—albeit on a broad level, too. That kind of comedy was a mainstay for decades, until almost every genre was covered (multiple times, in certain cases), filmmakers stretched for gags, and audiences started to notice—or, more appropriately, stopped paying attention.

Here, Abel and Gordon (as they're also credited) essentially take on film noir. The characters make that clear, as we meet a private detective and a man with a shadowy past and a one-armed assassin and another man who becomes unwittingly caught up in a deadly scheme, and so, too, does the plot. It's convoluted and unlikely, which some would argue is a staple of the genre anyway, as the shady man and his cohorts try to trick the unaware dupe into becoming the target of the assassin.

The plot here doesn't matter, obviously, since it's just a means of throwing out as many jokes as possible. One could probably count on a single hand how many of them actually work and still have uncounted fingers remaining.

The initial target of the assassin is Boris (Abel), a bartender at the eponymous pub in Brussels. Boris seems done for when Georges (Bruno Romy) walks into the bar and aims a pistol at him, but the would-be killer has a mechanical arm, which malfunctions just as he pulls the trigger and flies off his body. Boris and his partners, his lover Kayoko (Kaori Ito) and strong-armed bodyguard Tim (Philippe Martz), are panicked, obviously, and in the chaos of their reaction, the attempted killer suddenly appears in frame to retrieve his arm.

That's a decent joke, and it probably doesn't say much about Abel and Gordon's sense of humor that most of the successful or near-successful gags here involve that faulty limb. It almost feels unfair to give away the best of the string of those jokes, especially since it happens late in the movie, but at one point, Georges' robotic arm is twisted around so it's pointed backwards. The killer is so determined in his mission, though, that he decides to try killing Boris—or, in some cases, the man he believes to be Boris—for the third or fourth time. How he finds a way to aim the pistol, while still seeing what he's doing, is a genuinely inspired bit of comedy.

Unfortunately, that can't be said of the overwhelming number of jokes here. Most of them just have the character behaving in a silly way without any rhyme or reason, while the actors look as if they're attempting to perform comedic business instead of just, you know, playing the joke.

Take a scene of Boris and Kayoko in bed, when he's haunted by a nightmare of his past. Boris starts running in place in bed, and for no discernible reason, his partner beings to mirror his movements. Why she's doing this is inexplicable, and whatever humor might have come from the gag is undermined by Abel's performance of it. His eyes are wide open, and we can see him watching his scene partner and occasionally hesitating to ensure that the staging is consistent.

Similar things happen a few times throughout the movie, especially when after it introduces the wrong man into the mix. He's Dom, a depressed loner living on the outskirts of the city who looks exactly like Boris, because he's also played by Abel. Boris and his cohorts spot Dom by chance, and Tim is enlisted to play friendly to, drug, and abduct Dom. The two men swap identities, leading to yet another mirror exercise between the two characters played by Abel. Whatever technique Abel and Gordon used to put the actor in two spots in frame is seamless, but the choreography certainly isn't.

As for Gordon in front of the camera, she plays Fiona, the private investigator who's also Dom's estranged wife, and she keeps just missing her husband in town, at his home, and at the cemetery where their daughter is buried (Ha?). One moment has Boris, disguised as Dom, leaping out a window, either to avoid being spotted or because he's hyperactive from an antidepressant patch. That we don't know the motivation of the joke means it's just more silliness for the sake of trying to be funny.

The whole of The Falling Star operates under that philosophy. Its error is doing so without doing the work to make the jokes, well, work.

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