Back in February, for a worrying moment, prolific French absurdist Quentin Dupieux seemed to be in danger of finally embracing sober midlife maturity when he unveiled his bittersweet sci-fi fable Incredible But True at the Berlinale. But with his second festival premiere in three months, the multi-hyphenate DIY auteur and sometime techno musician swings the pendulum in the opposite direction with his unashamedly goofy tenth feature, Smoking Causing Coughing. Showing out of competition in the Midnight Screening slot in Cannes, this loosely linked jumble of comic skits, splatter-horror gags and knowing riffs on nostalgic childhood TV tropes is too slight and disjointed to earn the kind of warm international welcome that Deerskin (2019) or Mandibles (2020) achieved. Even so, Dupieux delivers his usual charming mix of surreal humor, loopy imagination, jaunty music and French screen royalty, with Gilles Lellouche and Adèle Exarchopolous featured in the rich ensemble cast.
The central plot of Smoking Causes Coughing revolves around Tobacco Force, a Power Rangers-style vigilante crime-fighting squad who battle intergalactic villains and rubber-suited monsters, deploying the lethal chemical ingredients of cigarettes as explosive death-ray weapons. Led by the pompous Benzène (Lellouche), the team report remotely to Chef Didier, a canine puppet character (voiced by Incredible But True co-star Alain Chabat) who seems to have a harem of eager human lovers, despite the trickle of green goo that oozes from his mouth at all times. What does it all mean? Not much, in fairness, but Dupieux and his cast milk maximum comic mileage from the film’s ironically sunny, wholesome tone and cheerfully grotesque comic-book splatter violence.
Aided by a pair of suicidal, dysfunctional robot sidekicks, Tobacco Force are notionally gearing up for a planet-saving confrontation with suave supervillain Lezardin, played by laconic Belgian clown Benoît Poelvoorde in his second Dupieux project. But this slender plot becomes a mere framing device for a series of quickfire vignettes and cut-away horror-comedy stories that the group members share between them, mostly around a campfire during a team-building retreat. One digression features two bickering couples on a shared holiday who discover a bizarre “thinking helmet” from the 1930s, a whimsical twist of fate that builds into a brutal massacre. The stand-out chapter concerns a young man who accidentally becomes trapped in his aunt’s industrial wood-pulping machine, remaining calm and upbeat even as his body is slowly squelched into a bucket of bloody pulp.
As a series of gags and sketches, Smoking Causes Coughing mostly hits the target. As a full-length feature, less so. Dupieux struggles to focus and shape the material, never properly exploring the Tobacco Force concept, then leaving the team stranded with an open-ended finale that feels non-committal and throwaway. Nobody really expects France’s most inventive screwball surrealist film-maker to fully embrace maturity as his 50th birthday looms, but a little more of the emotional depth and structural cohesion that he applied in Mandibles or Incredible But True could have been useful here.
Smoking Causes Coughing is Dupieux on autopilot: effortless fun during its lean 80-minute running time, instantly forgettable afterwards. But even if it falls short of his best work, no need to worry. Kick back, relax, have a smoke, because his next film will be along very soon.
Director, screenwriter, cinematography, editing: Quentin Dupieux
Cast: Gilles Lellouche, Vincent Lacoste, Anaïs Demousiter, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Oulaya Amamra, Doria Tillier, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Blanche Gardin, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alain Chabat
Producer: Hugo Sélignac
Costume designer : Justine Pearce
Production company : Chi-Fou-Mi Productions
World sales: Gaumount
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Midnight Screenings)
In French
80 minutes
