Parisian Quentin Dupieux is another filmmaker. Total author since he deals with the production, script, photography and editing of his films (and this time not with the music because he wanted to use an unknown techno LP that he had at home, as simple as it was mesmerizing ). Personal writer because he combines humor and strangeness with unique confidence, sleepy costume design and toy surrealism.
Strange but true
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France. 2022. 74. (12). comedy
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Direction, screenplay and photography:
Quentin Dupieux. -
Interpreter:
Alain Chabat, Leah Drucker, Anais Demoustier, and Benedict Magimel. Music: Jon Santo.
Dupieux, who released two films after Jaws last year, Smoking Makes Cough, and this one, which ran through San Sebastián’s Fantastic and Horror Films Week, offers us with Unbelievable But True a comedy that might does not excite Open laughter, but also a nervous laugh and a gaping mouth at an approach that is as absurd as it is attractive.
I had better not spoil this starting point for you. It will be enough for them to know that a couple buys a house in the basement of which there is a sewer into which, when you enter, something amazing happens that subverts the rules of space and, above all, time. I’ll tell you the subplot if you’d like: The main couple, who keep their sweetheart a secret, are related to another (he’s a friend/boss of the first at an insurance broker) who, however, reveals a secret: he has an implant placed in Japan an electronic penis.
“Unbelievable But True” offers just under an hour and a half of French cinema in a small but robust, timeless format (even with a touch of Tati in his wordless scenes of repeated movements around the house), but topical in the note on the subject of obsessive cult around the body and the youth. It might not take full advantage of the bizarre approach, but you could like it as a small but cohesive piece of bizarre cinema, and it dares to get darker in the final section. Classic surrealism already knew it: there are ants in beautiful bodies.
