Tripwire Reviews Smoking Causes Coughing

Nonsense Of The Best Kind

Tripwire’s contributing writer Laurence Boyce reviews new superhero parody film Smoking Causes Coughing out from today …

Smoking Causes Coughing
Director: Quentin Dupieux
Stars: Gilles Lellouche, Vincent Lacoste, Anaïs Demoustier

It’s fair to say that the work of French director Quentin Dupieux has always been somewhat eclectic. His 2010 breakout film Rubber was a gloriously OTT mix of intellectual introspection and B-Movie schlock. 2012 Wrong was an existentialist surreal comedy while 2020’s Mandibles was a story about a giant ant. And let’s not forget Dupieux’s other career as electronic Mr Oizo, a name to familiar to those of a certain age and for whom ‘Flat Beat’ was an essential late 90s soundtrack. Throughout his work, Dupieux has always crafted surreal worlds and carved out a twisted sense of reality, which alternate between being comedic and disturbing.

During a fertile period for the director (with the 2022 released Incredible But True, the forthcoming film Daaaaaali! due for a French release in November and the just announced ‘secretly filmed’ project Yannick being released in France in August) comes Smoking Causes Coughing. A ragbag of silly ideas, shaggy dog stories all wrapped up within a genre milieu the film, which premiered at this year’s Cannes in the Midnight Section, feels like a jumbled bunch of ideas that Dupieux didn’t have anywhere else to put. But when it comes to Dupieux, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

The Tobacco Force – who, despite their name, are actually anti-smoking and use the powers of nicotine, methane and other chemicals to defeat their enemies – begin our escapades by fighting a giant turtle. When their boss Chief Didier (an anthropomorphic rat who looks suspiciously like a certain sewer dwelling sensei of a group of ninja turtles) feels that the Force is losing cohesion as a team, he sends them on a country retreat. Whilst there, the group sits around a fire and recount surreal stories, launching us into vignettes about a woman in a sensory deprivation helmet who goes insane and a man caught in an industrial crusher. But as their bonding exercise continues, Chief Didier is soon on the phone to advise them of a new threat facing the Earth.

The film takes in a myriad of pop culture influences. The opening fight is straight out of Power Rangers (just with a lot more gore), our intrepid team play with the modern idea of cinematic superheroes and the structure of short stories is straight out of the Amicus / Tales of the Crypt playbook. There’s little sense of cohesion here, with Dupieux happy to keep setting up a bunch of jokes and (often comically gory) set-pieces, all filmed with the sense of a B-Movie done on the cheap. Moments such as the one in which a character ends being little more than a mouth in a bucket of human remains flirts with outrageous bad taste, but there’s such a level of silliness and dumb fun throughout that one is carried along during the slight 77 minute run time.

As with Dupieux’s other films, one can never quite tell with Dupieux whether he wants to make an underlying serious, intellectual and philosophical point or just wants to let loose and be stupid. There are certain things that bubble under –notions of individual responsibility, our relationship with technology and ideas of social embarrassment are all played with and alluded to – but the prevailing mood is one of surreal insouciance.

Smoking While Coughing is a throwback to the kind of film that – once upon a time – you’d see screening late night on Channel 4 or BBC2 after stumbling home half cut: one that would leave you giggling like an idiot (especially if you’ve had some herbal refreshment) and wondering if what you are watching is real or a fever dream. It doesn’t really make a lick of sense, but you’ll have fun anyway.

Smoking Causes Coughing is released in the UK by Picturehouse Entertainment from today 7 July