“Smoking makes you cough”: Quentin Dupierre, mad and melancholic

The meaning of “the world” – to see

Smoking causes coughis always better than ” Smoking kills “. Here we are, gasping for cigarette smoke, breathing our impending doom until the sum of our carelessness is fatal to us all. The latest feature from the prolific Quentin Dupuy (his third since deer, released in 2019) is undoubtedly the darkest and most melancholic of all his films, behind a simple-minded yet beautiful superhero script. Maybe this explains it: mediocrity drives us straight into the wall. But Dupierre refuses to pin the message on the windshield and leads the viewer down an uncertain path, each story descending a little further into the trivialization of the din and mayhem…

But let’s start from the beginning: we find that the “tobacco power” five vigilantes beat a monstrous turtle, although the beast is not so terrible. He almost looked like a panicked Casimir taking a green shell as a shield. No matter seems to animate the opening scene, except that the monster must be killed, and the mission is filled with glee by the crew, who slather it with toxic products that ooze from its forearms.

The Scheherazade effect

On this uncertain planet, perhaps we should treat evil with evil: there’s nicotine (Anais Demostier), benzene (Gilles Lelouch), ammonia (Oulaia Amamra), mercury (Jean-Pascal Zad) and methanol (Vincent Lacoste), bottled. their blue suits. Excited, Kercher devotes himself body and soul to his work – especially the bodies of the girls, who are objectified by their libidinous director, the rathead voiced by Alain Chabat. The five “janitors” are not long away from their boss in the countryside, under the pretext of strengthening the unity of the group. A cabin that looks like a utopian capsule awaits them in the countryside.

Randomly, Dupierre creates dazzling images, such as a fish storyteller who doesn’t have time to finish a sentence because he’s being cooked.

Dismissed colleagues pass the time by telling each other scary stories. The stories are related to “Toupee I stuck in my eyes”, which provides the effect of Scheherazade and does not stop to stay alive. Smoking causes cough Located in the anteroom of the end of the world, where everything is allowed: the filmmaker has fun hiding his actors under wigs, to the point that some are unrecognizable – for example, Anais Demostier as a blonde with a stone haircut – or ask them to play for a few minutes and then leave, for example, Adele Exarchopoulos, Doria Tillier, David Marsay, Gregoire Ludig.