There are few joys greater for a cinephile than seeing a filmmaker yield completely and unconditionally to their impulses. Great cinematic stylists can and often do mold their idiosyncrasies to form and fit works of all manner but there’s something so special about great style pushed to its zenith, an expression of creative inspiration as personal as it is pure, executed by the only person capable of expressing it.
Such is Smoking Causes Coughing, a movie perhaps best described as the most Quentin Dupieux film yet to exist. To describe it with any degree of accuracy, one would likely require a familiarity with Dupieux’s canon to date; to appreciate it, however, one requires only an open mind and a big old funny bone. This is the cinema of the absurd, vaulted to absurd extremes by, arguably, the finest absurdist filmmaker of his time. It’s bloody good fun.
If Dupieux has irritated and alienated audiences before with his tales of seven-year-old mass shooters, homicidal car tires and giant performing flies, Smoking Causes Coughing will, no doubt, only add insult to injury. And that’s in part because it seems designed to achieve precisely that — for all the zaniness of his previous features, this one multiplies it over and over. Essentially an anthology sketch piece of gonzo fables with a framing narrative that’s no less ridiculous than any of the stories told herein, the whole piece feels as though it’s on a mission to outdo the whimsy, the illogicality and the hilarity of everything you’ve seen or heard before it, including each of its own stories. And it pretty much succeeds.
If any of Smoking Causes Coughing were to make sense, its appeal would diminish substantially, so a bare-bones narrative outline is the most with which any prospective viewer ought to enter. The central characters are the five members of the Tobacco Force, vigilantes in bright blue spandex combatting supervillains by channeling the destructive forces of cigarettes. According to their commander, their bond is growing weak, so they’re sent on a retreat to work on their team spirit. It’s here that, in preparation for an upcoming battle against Lézardin, their fiercest foe yet, the five mostly sit around, bicker and tell stories of terrible misfortunes they’ve overheard — these are the aforementioned fables, recounted by both the Tobacco Force and, at one point, a half-cooked barracuda.
Dupieux, who wrote, directed, shot and edited this movie, has seemingly indulged every ridiculous idea he’s had but not been able to shape into a feature into this ludicrous assemblage of wonderfully fatuous folly. Given the slightness of many, if not all, of his other works’ conceits, one wonders if he couldn’t have shaped all of these into much more substantial projects, but their unification here is particularly delightful. Dupieux’s material is perfectly suited to a sketch format and the tenuousness of their union within a single project isn’t problematic — it’s equally perfectly suited to his flippant, nonchalant style of storytelling. Robots commit suicide and no one bats an eye. Families are slathered in the blood of giant, monstrous tortoises, entirely to their gratitude. The world’s most sought-after bachelor is a puppet rat with green slime dripping from his mouth. In a world where nothing makes sense, everything makes sense!
In truth, Dupieux’s nonchalance is both his strength and his weakness — it affords his movies an affable quality and imbues every gag with an added patina of pointlessness that only accentuates their verve. But it also prevents them from reaching a level of sublimity that the best absurdist art can reach, even if said flippancy is essential to the form of Dupieux’s own, most singular style of absurdist art. Smoking Causes Coughing may be the boldest, purest expression of his particular creative inspiration yet, but it also begs the question of what Dupieux might be capable of were he to nurture a few additional impulses alongside his existing ones. As a piece of stylistic totality, however, it’s a genuinely terrific movie, hilarious in every single scene and a fabulous taunt directed at those who might wish he’d just smarten up and take things seriously. Smoking causes coughing, folks! Now that’s serious!
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