By guest contributor Darren Gaskell
Following an energy-sapping battle against an evil giant turtle, five superheroes known as the Tobacco Force are instructed by Didier, their chief, to head for a rural retreat in order to work on their cohesion as a team. Soon after they reach their swanky recovery pad, bickering and uncertainty among the group sets in, which is round about the time that Lézardin, Emperor Of Evil and number one threat to the planet, decides the Earth needs to be put out of its misery…
Welcome to another trip into the mind of Quentin Dupieux, the man responsible for killer tyre movie Rubber (2010) and several other bizarre cinematic outings. If you saw Rubber and loved it, chances are you’ll get plenty of mileage out of this one too. If you saw Rubber and hated it, Dupieux’s latest venture is unlikely to convert you as all of those zany, random detours which wound you up to the point of breaking something are still present and correct.
This time out, the viewer is served up the Power Rangers episode which A24 decided to distribute crossed with a slimmed-down portmanteau movie, as our heroes take time out from their soul-searching to tell each other scary campfire stories – or are interrupted by a someone else who wants to tell them a scary campfire story, as in the case of a young girl. Or a talking fish on the grill. Okay, make that something.
In most other films, this would be an indication that the A-plot has absolutely nowhere to go and the button marked “STALLING FOR TIME” is being walloped frantically by the filmmaker. However, in this corner of the Dupieux multiverse, the term “A-plot” is undefined and the sharp turns in the proceedings seem more to do with him having had enough of his protagonists for the time being, wishing to regale the audience with something entirely different.
To which end, there’s a vignette about a helmet which turns its wearer into a serial killer. This is bizarre, gory and quite amusing. Another detour takes us to a farm, at which a well-meaning but useless bloke has fallen into a nasty-looking piece of machinery and is steadily being turned into mush via a series of mechanical malfunctions and incoherent instructions. This is bizarre, gory and quite amusing.
For a large proportion of Smoking Causes Coughing, Dupieux seems ambivalent at best about his suit-clad super folks, painting them as a shambling, vain bunch, even if they’re a shambling, vain bunch who can combine their individual powers to blast their foes with an accelerated form of cancer. This causes coughing, no doubt, but also hideous death by explosion, accompanied by a spectacular shower of blood and guts, which whacks an abrupt and eye-popping exclamation point on what had previously been a scrap straight from a Saturday morning kids’ show.
Leader of the team Benzène (Gilles Lellouche) is becoming disillusioned with his charges, possibly with good reason: Méthanol (Vincent Lacoste) is showing his grumpy, sullen side more; Mercure (Jean-Pascal Zadi) is missing his family; and Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier) holds a candle for boss Didier, which would ordinarily make for much musing on unrequited love with an unobtainable guy except that…
…Didier is a rat. Not only is Didier a rat, but he’s also a rat who constantly dribbles green goo of unknown origin. Fifth team member Ammoniaque (Oulaya Amamra) advises that going in for a snog could have dangerous consequences other than a doomed workplace romance, as Didier’s drool could be toxic or detergent. For all his heroism and will to protect the world, Didier is a hilariously foul creation, a nightmarish rodent puppet voiced by Alain Chabat. Of course, women find Didier irresistible. The combination of Didier’s stoicism and slobbering broke me every single time and I was then waiting for the next time he appeared, but your appreciation of the character may depend on how funny you find the concept of Tony Stark looking like the cousin of Trevor from Meet The Feebles.
In terms of performances, Demoustier stands out as the lovelorn, more emotionally fragile of the group, but everyone here turns in agreeable work: the cast includes such luminaries as Adèle Exarchopoulos and Benoît Poelvoorde, so Dupieux’s ability to attach Euro cinema fixtures to his eccentric projects remains undimmed.
Running just seventy-seven minutes, Smoking Causes Coughing is acutely aware of how far to stretch its ramshackle comedic stylings and gets out while the going’s (mostly) good. However, for those who fail to acquire the taste for its baked-in wackiness, this will feel like seventy-seven hours, as Dupieux refuses to develop any of the many plot threads and eschews an action packed climax in favour of a more elegant, budgetary-conscious solution. Following the trend of tentpole superhero movies there’s also a post-credit sequence, but even that isn’t setting anything up for the next movie; it’s a scene engineered to eke out a previous joke which has already been thrashed to within an inch of its life.
Dupieux seems more comfortable than ever with pushing the boundaries of absurdism and leaving the viewer with little or no explanation as to just what the hell is going on, displaying an approach to the material which is so laid back that there’s no attempt to win the audience over with the expected crowd pleasing moments of the franchises being parodied. This will infuriate just as many as it will delight, but I rather enjoyed the non-adventures of Tobacco Force.
Smoking Causes Coughing is out on general release (UK) on 7th July 2023.