Smoking Causes Coughing review – cigarette-superhero comedy is refreshingly immature – The Guardian
Only a pedant and a bore would complain that the final phrase of that title ought to be “most cancers”. The phrase’s childlike naivety and irrelevance, apparently taken from an out of date period when smoking was thought of unhealthy within the sense that consuming cream truffles was unhealthy, is a touch of what you’re in for: a fantastically foolish and magnificently inconsequential comedy from French film-maker and former DJ Quentin Dupieux. For the lifetime of me, I can’t consider one other director proper now who needs (or is allowed) to do exactly straight comedy for theatrical launch, with out having to purchase the best to take action by additionally being unfunnily darkish and disturbing.
Dupieux has put collectively one thing chaotic, disparate, solely negligible and but oddly gripping and in addition humorous. For all that that is very French, many factors of comparability appeared to me Anglo-Saxon. “Smoking causes coughing” is like one in all Tristram Shandy’s opinions. Dupieux is famend, or infamous, for his throwaway zaniness and adventures in surreal whimsy, and has collected a fanbase alongside the best way for films comparable to Deerskin and Unimaginable However True. Smoking Causes Coughing is I believe his finest but, and the truth that many individuals are going to search out it intensely annoying is actually one in all its comedian results.
It’s theoretically a portmanteau movie, a set of quick tales with an overarching narrative gadget, however that is to overstate its structural soundness – it’s extra rickety than that. In modern-day France, a workforce of superheroes referred to as the Tobacco Drive do battle with bizarrely rubbery monsters. These warriors of advantage are named after the constituent components of cigarettes: Benzene (Gilles Lelouche), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi) and Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra). Carrying costumes and helmets, like a cross between the Energy Rangers and Daft Punk, they kill these evil beasts by surrounding them and blowing their particular person vapours which mix to kind deadly cigarette smoke.
Their controller is a rat referred to as Didier (voiced by Alain Chabat), with an unsettling resemblance to Flat Eric, the puppet created by Dupieux in his earlier profession making music movies and TV commercials. After slaying the sort of dragon-creature that Captain Kirk as soon as confronted on a distant planet, the workforce are curtly knowledgeable by Didier that they need to retreat to a particular coaching centre to regroup mentally and spiritually, prepared for the upcoming struggle with a brand new villain: the Emperor of Evil, Lizardin (performed by veteran Belgian comedian Benoît Poelvoorde). As soon as on the camp, the workforce collect across the campfire and inform one another scary tales, and these weird and extraneous items of directionless nonsense are tensely dramatised.
The cumulative impact could be very pleasurable. The movie has bought some Python, Douglas Adams, Charlie Kaufman and in addition John Waters and Ed Wooden Jr in it; it’s additionally potential that Dupieux has seen Peter Prepare dinner and Dudley Moore in Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled. You would possibly end up pondering at one stage of the crew aboard the Nostromo in Ridley Scott’s Alien, and even Tony Soprano’s haunted relationship with Large Mouth Billy Bass, his malign speaking fish. And but this movie can also be solely distinctive. Maybe, like Adam McKay, Dupieux will transfer away to extra solemnly meant materials. For now, fortunately, he’s retaining it immature.
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