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SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING
Director: Quentin Dupieux Cast: Gilles Lellouche, Anaïs Demoustier, Vincent Lacoste, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Oulaya Amamra, Grégoire Ludig, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Jêrôme Niel, Doria Tillier, Blanche Gardin, Anthony Sonigo, David Marsais, Tanguy Mercier, Julia Faure, Benoît Poelvoorde, Benoite Chivot, Jules Dhios-Francisco, the voices of Alain Chabat, Ferdinand Canaud, Franck Lascombes MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:20 Release Date: 3/31/23 (limited; digital & on-demand) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 30, 2023 The main issue might be that filmmaker Quentin Dupieux's insistence on making absurdist art gets in the way of the promise of some clever storytelling. In Smoking Causes Coughing, Dupieux seems to be tackling the superhero genre putting together a team of self-involved avengers against threats such as a human-sized tortoise, which is pretty much acknowledged in-movie to be someone in a rubber suit, and a human-lizard hybrid with intentions of destroying the planet. The writer/director's latest begins with some silly promise. That's apparently too much straightforward consistency for the filmmaker, though, who basically tosses away the conceit to make an entirely different movie than the one this begins as. The result is kind of an anthology tale, in that a three characters tell three different stories (although one of them is so short that it barely qualifies). As for the squad of heroes, they're little more than an excuse to establish a backdrop in which these stories can be told. It's too bad, because the strange gimmick of the team is fairly amusing. They're called the Tobacco Force, and its members are named after assorted chemicals: Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi), Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra), and Methanol (Vincent Lacoste). After defeating the large tortoise (leading to an explosion of blood and viscera that defies the laws of physics), the team's boss Chief Didier (voice of Alain Chabat), a rat puppet with green goo constantly dripping from its mouth, orders the Tobacco Force to go on a one-week retreat to help build solidarity. They'll need it to defeat Lizardin (Benoît Poelvoorde), who plans to destroy Earth in about a week's time. Meanwhile, there's a bit of a power struggle among the group, and Nicotine has to deal with the inexplicable attraction she has for her slimy rat of a boss. Forget all of that, though. The real point—as much as something this intentionally absurd can have a point, which is, well, the point—is for assorted characters—one team member, a little girl who likes scary stories, a talking fish—to offer up the most frightening tales they can imagine. One involves a woman discovering a helmet that heightens one's thoughts, leading her to hate her husband and friends, into an existential crisis, and directly toward a violent murder spree. Another has a fish—not the talking one—discovering why its home is so cloudy, and the third revolves around an accident involving an industrial wood chipper that's barely an inconvenience to the person whose body is gradually being turned to pulp. It's obvious that Dupieux is a filmmaker with a seemingly boundless—and, apparently, boundlessly demented—imagination. Smoking Causes Coughing once again shows, though, that his larger intentions of absurdism mean that his crafty stories serve little point but to be pointless. Copyright © 2023 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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