Where do we start with this one? Smoking Causes Coughing is the latest film from Quentin Dupieux, whose breakthrough film Rubber (2010) was a comedy horror about a killer car tyre and who later went on to make Deerskin, about a man who becomes obsessed with fringed jacket. His latest feature, made in Dupieux’s native French language, fuses together elements of superheroes, social commentary, an anthology movie ala Creepshow, and some bizarre puppetry in to a wild and weird story which is sort of about a team called Tobacco Force who set out to save the planet from destruction. And smoking, it’s about smoking.
Tobacco Force are a band of blue spandex wearing vigilantes who look a little like bargain basement Power Rangers, and who used their individual powers, drawn from the harmful chemicals found in cigarettes, to overcome their enemies by giving them cancer and causing them to explode. Among the team is Nicotine, Ammoniaque and Benzène, and their trustee sidekick robot Norbert, and they’re all led by Chief Didier, a slime drooling rat puppet who is apparently irresistible to women. After battling a giant turtle, or rather a man dressed in a giant turtle suit, the team are told that they must attend a retreat to work on group cohesion ahead of an imminent fight with Lizardin, since Didier has intercepted an email from Lizardin’s PA that suggests he’s on course to destroy the Earth. And all of this in the first 10 minutes.
While on retreat at a remote woodland location, the team sit around a campfire and tell one another stories and the film changes tone. The first tale that’s told is about two couples who rent a holiday home where one of them discovers a strange helmet that enables her to find a sense of peace, leading her to reappraise the people around her with horrific and hilarious results. It’s like a short and very gory episode of Inside Number 9. Later on, there’s a tale about a fish who finds out the lake he’s in is being polluted, and another tale about a man stuck in a woodchipper who ends up as a bucket of red gloop with a mouth, philosophising about his predicament. You get the idea. Or maybe you don’t.
Running at around 75 mins this is a dash of a movie that doesn’t stop for breath, and which is surreal, low fi, and unapologetically silly. It’s also a mess of a movie that tries to stitch together a whole bunch of random ideas into an almost coherent whole, throwing in some brilliant visual gags and excellent dead pan humour along the way. It doesn’t always work. Some of the “jokes” go on too long and the overall mishmash of ideas is so rich and lurid it’s sometimes hard to focus on, let alone care about. There’s an underlying message about humanity’s folly and our inability to face the facts about our own imminent demise, but you have to work hard to find it.
Overall though, this is an extraordinary piece of daft, playful filmmaking and great fun in places. You might love it or you might hate it. But it’s definitely worth a watch to find out which it is.
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