THE Quentin Dupieux films are serious things: bizarre objects, movies (very short by current standards) or curious installations, designed to make you laugh and worry. Usually at the root there are questions that are far from laughable, but “the other Quentin”He always faces them as if they have a double bottombetween levity and disturbance.
In the case of the film that passes today in the Special Gala section of the Berlinale 2022, Incroyable mais vrai, it is a tunnel that apparently leads to the cellar of the house that Alain and Marie are about to buy.
Alain Chabat and Léa Drucker, the protagonists of Quentin Dupieux’s film.
The real estate agent, faced with the astonishment of the middle-aged couple played by Alain Chabat and Léa Druker, magnificent the properties of what they are about to see (and experience), but months later when Alain confronts him in a parking lot to ask him about what is happening to them as a result of that careless purchase, he will wisely comment that he too is crazy about Armagnac, but who doesn’t drink a case of it in the evening. Everything in life must be taken in moderation.
In the cinema of Dupieux, also known as Mr. Oizo to admirers of his synthesizer performances, there has always been little moderation. Starting from Rubber (2010) a horror with a killer tire as the protagonist o the irresistible Le daim – Double skin (2019) in which Jean Dujardin was possessed by his fringed leather jacket or again Mandibules (2020), encounter between two idiots, a giant fly and a screaming girl.
Dupieux’s films resemble just as many stakes of Twilight zone – At the edge of reality and here too, as in The daim, we are grappling with the obsession that inhabits a character, or rather more than one. When Alain’s boss, Gérard (Benoît Magimel) shows up at their house with his showy girlfriendJeanne (Anaïs Demoustier), has a novelty to share, an extraordinary mechanical innovation that allows her body to perform unexpectedly, which Jeanne also benefits from.
A thought on femininity
Yet that revelation is little compared to the secret that Marie prevents Alain from revealing. The psychotic delusion that sooner or later all of Dupieux’s characters arrive in fact this time it’s all hers, Marie’s. If in the folds of The daim housed a very little reassuring reflection on masculinity, Incroyable mais vrai try to say something about femininity.
Completely disconnected from the world, in the throes of a madness that pretends to defy the laws of physics and, literally, separated from Alain at home, Marie stops being a farce character and becomes a tragic figure.
Quentin Dupieux. (Getty Images)
Dupieux’s films once baffled audiences and infuriated the critics. Variety in 2013 he wrote about Wrong Cops: «It should end up directly in the cinema prison without going through the street», but there is the risk that now this too enfant terrible of French cinema has created its own canon.
In Rubber one of the secondary characters (the protagonist was not human), a policeman, openly declared the device: “Sometimes things happen without a reason”. Here is another homage to the principle that guides the (real) lives of almost all of us. So beware of hatches, tunnels, beware of ants. And most importantly, by real estate agents.
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