Can a giant house fly be trained to do your bidding? By the end of director Quentin Dupieux’s dryly hilarious buddy movie Mandibles, you will believe in strange magic, or at least that you can build a solid and even sweet movie around such a ridiculous premise.
The plot emerges when small-time hood Jean Gab (David Marsais) and his slightly smarter buddy Manu (Grégoire Ludig) embark on a shady courier job. Jean Gab hot-wires a car to use for their underworld task, but the friends hear strange noises coming from the trunk, they open it up to find a giant fly. Manu has a money-making idea: let’s train it to rob banks!
That’s it; if the low concept is straight out of some adolescent’s idea of a B-movie, the leads somehow turn a pair of dim-witted and compulsively lying criminals into characters who, if they aren’t exactly likeable, are at least mildly sympathetic. Even though they’re frequently annoying; the two share a childlike secret handshake, making bull-horns with their fingers and interlocking them as they shout “Toro.”
At the very least, you want Manu to be able to train the fly, whom he endearingly names Dominique. Naming the fly (who is kind of cute) is part of what makes Mandibles, despite the off-putting title, kind of heartwarming. If the film’s trailer promises some madcap wackiness, Dupieux instead gets across a dryer deadpan tone, which tempers all sorts of potential excesses: the sentimentality, the cruelty and the silliness all comes off better thanks to that carefully modulated tone. That’s the only way to play such an absurd plot with any success: the underlying notes here are of a modest French buddy movie, and Dupieux has simply added the old ‘50s sci-fi trope of (possibly) radioactive vermin into the formula.
For American viewers Mandibles might well seem like Dude Where’s My Car? with a dose of deadpan dada. But there’s a more direct French influence. With his shaggy hair, Marsais (whose character is in fact mistaken for someone else) could pass for Gérard Depardieu’s grandson, and Ludig’s mustachioed thug bears some resemblance to Patrick Dewaere; which makes this buddy movie an unofficial remake of Bertrand Blier’s 1974 crime comedy Going Places, starring Depardieu and Dewaere as a pair of traveling criminals taking their own eventful road trip.
One couldn’t blame a viewer for rolling their eyes at another sub-90-minute genre exercise from this at times self-conscious French director-composer. But Dupieux’s last film Deerskin took its own unpromising premise of a would-be filmmaker (Jean Dujardin) obsessed with a deerskin jacket and turned it into a fascinating 77-minute horror-comedy (and a more intelligent movie about moviemaking than Dujardin’s Oscar-winning The Artist). Mandibles, which takes more risks, is even better. Take, for instance, Blue is the Warmest Color star Adèle Exarchopoulos, who has a strange turn here as Agnès, a woman who because of an accident can only speak at a volume level that seems to convey constant distress. Like so much of this movie, the role on paper shouldn’t work, the loud talker being a throwaway sitcom or slapstick stock character worthy of “The Benny Hill Show.” But Exarchopoulos sells it, not least because she seems like the only person in the movie who reacts to the giant fly as if it’s emerged from some 21st-century nightmare.
Still, Marsais and Ludig are at the heart of Mandibles, and make no mistake, there’s a heart behind the segmented eyes and forbidding maw. The actors grant these cruel adult children a level of pathos; who failed them, one wonders? Their parents? The system? The culture? That they can function at all perhaps proves the film’s premise: Jean Gab and Manu are the giant flies of France, grotesque and little more than vermin in society’s eyes; but give them a little training, and maybe they can work wonders. Then again, maybe a giant fly is just a giant fly; in that case too, Mandibles should earn a healthy buzz.
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