THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Through his increasingly delirious film escapades, Quentin Dupieux is in the process of inventing, at the heart of French cinema, an improbable niche, a new pataphysical comedy. Since At office ! (2018), the filmography of this versatile director, also active in the field of electro music under the pseudonym of Mr. Oizo, has crystallized in a formula which now guarantees him a cruising speed of around one film per year. .
Formula which consists in combining a short duration with an explosive concept, with a high potential for absurdity – we will cite, by way of examples, The deer (2019) and his fringed jacket dictating murderous impulses to whoever wears it, or even mandibles (2020) and its giant fly trained by two morons. The result is funny pastilles with frank verve, but with an unsituable graphic universe, oscillating between surrealist fable and parodic sketch, eccentric B series and schoolboy humbug assumed as speed of execution.
Incredible but true is the last specimen to be released in theaters (in the meantime, Dupieux has already shot another, Smoking makes you cough presented at Cannes), and undoubtedly the funniest film seen in recent times. Everything here revolves around a hole, a silly pipe made in the cellar of a house put up for sale. According to the real estate agent who shows it around, this is the ” nail “ of the pavilion that Alain and Marie (Alain Chabat and Léa Drucker), an ordinary couple in all respects, of mature age and without children, hesitate to buy. And for good reason, since the well houses nothing less than a spatio-temporal vortex. Whoever descends there not only emerges on the floor, but is propelled twelve hours later and rejuvenated by three days.
Smelling a vague windfall, the household settles in, not yet knowing what to do with this absurd passage. Alain, an insurance agent with a big hair in his hand, quickly loses interest, but Marie, dreaming of rediscovering her early youth, lets herself be absorbed in blocks of twelve hours, increasingly abandoning the home.
disruptive agent
The first comic spring of the film comes from this strange friction between the most flat ordinary and the extraordinary as posed in the middle. From the hole and its aberrant device, worthy of the impossible constructions of the artist Maurits Cornelis Escher, Dupieux does not make a fiction enhancer, but on the contrary has fun underlining the useless, inoperative character.
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