Prolific French absurdist Quentin Dupieux smuggles some deep, dark themes into a concise, funny package in Incredible but True. The former pop musician and video director takes a less surreal tone than usual here, musing on mortality, midlife melancholy and fading love in a bittersweet fairy-tale plot that recalls the deadpan sci-fi satires of Charlie Kaufman and the sardonic despair of Michel Houellebecq. Featuring strong ensemble cast chemistry and reliably rich in laughs, this Berlinale world premiere feels like Dupieux’s most serious-minded work to date, even if its brisk pacing sometimes undermines its dramatic and emotional force. The director’s growing international profile in the wake of Deerskin (2019) and Mandibles (2020) should guarantee a healthy audience beyond the film festival echo chamber.
The plot of Incredible but True is packed with potential spoilers, so excuse the vagueness here. When middle-aged couple Alain (Alain Chabat) and Marie (Léa Drucker) buy a new home in the sleepy suburbs, their comically twitchy estate agent Franck (Stéphane Pezerat ) reveals that the house has a very unusual, “radically life-changing” feature. Dupieux makes great sport out of teasing viewers with this shock reveal for as long as possible, nimbly skipping between timelines, so no deep details here. But suffice to say the new homeowners seem to be gifted with a potential pathway to eternal youth. While Alain is unimpressed and wary, Marie becomes obsessed with rewinding the clock and reclaiming her younger self. “Getting old is horrible,” she berates Alain, “you don’t realise because you don’t care about your body.”
Meanwhile, Alain’s boorish alpha-male boss Gerard (Benoît Magimel) and his younger libertine girlfriend Jeanne (Anaïs Demoustier) are eager to share a life-changing secret of their own, a piece of cutting-edge medical technology which promises to supercharge their already racy sex lives. Dupieux milks maximum slapstick humour from this preposterous sunplot, aided by a deliciously weasly, bombastic performance from Magimel in his first collaboration with the director. Inevitably, both couples soon find they have opened a Pandora’s box, with Utopian promise curdling into nightmarish horror. Previously unspoken tensions between the group erupt as the gulf between midlife contentment and festering dissatisfaction is laid bare.
Incredible but True amplifies the fairy-tale symbolism in its latter half with a magically rejuvenated rotten apple. There are distant echoes of Snow White here, but also Alice in Wonderland, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Faustian mythology, Garden of Eden imagery and more. Dupieux typically scoffs at questions about deeper meanings and literary allusions in his films, insisting they are mere entertainment, but this levity should not be taken for shallowness. Like much of the director’s past work, this cautionary comic fable is a study in hubris, vanity and existential despair. His most contented characters are those who accept that life is short, beauty is finite and disappointment is inevitable.
Speaking of brevity, the film’s snappy tempo is its only real flaw. The final chaotic crescendo is compressed into a largely wordless montage, which has a zippy cartoon energy but feels much too rushed. Dupieux is renowned for his fast, low-budget shoots but this speedy denouement feels like an efficiency too far, diluting the emotional force of witnessing these unhappy lives fully unravel on screen. Squeezed into an unusually compact 74 minutes, Incredible but True could comfortably have been half an hour longer, a rarity among film festival titles.
Handling cinematography and editing duties himself, and working as ever with his production designer wife Joan Le Boru, Dupieux gives Incredible but True an attractively sunny, informal, lightly stylised scruffy-chic look punctuated by some beautiful pastoral vistas and slick visual effects work. Rucker’s de-ageing process is especially well handled, with Roxane Arnal briefly stepping in as the much younger Marie. An ironically chirpy soundtrack of vintage classical pieces by obscure 1970s synthesizer player Jon Santo adds to film’s overall aura of time-warped, uncanny, analogue-era oddness.
Director, screenwriter, cinematography, editing: Quentin Dupieux
Cast: Alain Chabat, Léa Drucker, Benoît Magimel, Anaïs Demoustier, Stéphane Pezerat, Marie-Christine Orry, Roxane Arnal
Producers: Mathieu Verhaeghe, Thomas Verhaeghe
Production designer: Joan Le Boru
Music: Jon Santo
Production company: Atelier de Production (France)
World sales: WTFilms, Paris
In French
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Special Gala)
74 minutes
