Solely a pedant and a bore would complain that the final phrase of that title needs to be “most cancers”. The phrase’s childlike naivety and irrelevance, apparently taken from an out of date period when smoking was thought-about unhealthy within the sense that consuming cream muffins was unhealthy, is a touch of what you’re in for: a fantastically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 fitting to take action by additionally being unfunnily darkish and disturbing.
Dupieux has put collectively one thing chaotic, disparate, totally negligible but oddly gripping and likewise humorous. For all that that is very French, many factors of comparability appeared to me Anglo-Saxon. “Smoking causes coughing” is like one in every of 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 way in which for motion pictures comparable to Deerskin and Unbelievable However True. Smoking Causes Coughing is I believe his finest but, and the truth that many individuals are going to seek out it intensely annoying is in reality one in every of its comedian results.
It’s theoretically a portmanteau movie, a group 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 substances of cigarettes: Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi) and Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra). Sporting 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 form of dragon-creature that Captain Kirk as soon as confronted on a distant planet, the workforce are curtly knowledgeable by Didier that they should 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 fireplace 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 likewise John Waters and Ed Wooden Jr in it; it’s additionally potential that Dupieux has seen Peter Cook dinner and Dudley Moore in Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled. You may 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 Massive Mouth Billy Bass, his malign speaking fish. And but this movie can also be totally distinctive. Maybe, like Adam McKay, Dupieux will transfer away to extra solemnly supposed materials. For now, fortunately, he’s holding it immature.
