Review: Fumer Fait Tousser / Smoking Causes Coughing

Fumer Fait Tousser /
Smoking Causes Coughing
Cert: 15 / 77 mins / Dir. Quentin Dupieux / Trailer

To the abstract then, and Quentin Dupieux's semi-surrealist comedy Smoking Causes Coughing. The film is centered around Tobacco Force, a present-day quintet of French, jump-suited action superheroes comprising Benzéne (Gilles Lellouche), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Ammoniaque (Oulaya Amamra), Mercure (Jean-Pascal Zadi) and Méthanol, (Vincent Lacoste). Between missions (brawling with mutated turtles and lobsters in a disused quarry), they're sent on a team-building retreat by their boss Chief Didier (Alain Chabat) to regroup before going up against their nemesis Lézardin (Benoît Poelvoorde). As the weekend progresses, stories are told which make the group re-evaluate their past, their future and their values...

SOUND

If only the film was as straightforward as that paragraph makes it sound. Even its own trailer only reflects about a third of what happens. This plays as Wes Anderson in some places, Tarantino in others, with notes of The Greasy Strangler as told by The Mighty Boosh. By the time we cut away to the tales characters are relaying to each other (none of which are about the heroes or their villains or anything either are trying to achieve), the film has dropped into Experimental™ mode, where performance and emotional-immersion far outstrip narrative credibility.

And if this sounds a bit up itself, it's supposed to. As much fun as he's having (and there is fun to be had here), director Quentin Dupieux delights in testing the audience's patience as the central plot evaporates under Tobacco Force's own scrutiny. And from the creator of a movie about a sentient, killer tyre this feels entirely in-keeping. The cast are impressively straight-faced considering how knowingly preposterous the whole thing is.

SHOCK

As film-making goes, the movie is arguably at its best when it veers away to the anthologised story-segments, although it's never more focused than in the lengthy conversation-scenes between the five. Huge stretches of the film look washed-out, like someone's whacked up the Gamma Correction to view details in a dark scene and then forgotten to set it back again. Dupieux tries to hide his worst excesses by channelling low budget shabby-chic, acting as if the slight crapness is fully intentional. And to be fair, Smoking Causes Coughing looks like it cost around £300 to make, so that will be true to some degree.

As intriguing as this is, it's difficult to recommend as it won't be for everybody*¹, especially if the subtitles are going to be a problem*². That said, if it's not your bag then 77 minutes is at least mercifully short. And related to this, Dupieux probably intended to close on an ironically open-ended, faux anticlimax, but it feels more like an improv group running out of steam three quarters of the way through a sketch. Like I said, intriguing.

Smoking Causes Coughing is a weird little hallucinogenic film. Certainly not unwelcome, but I have no idea what it's for, what it's trying to do or how well it succeeds. But I didn't not-enjoy it, so that has to count for something...

*¹ Even just taking the concept at face value, I've never smoked, I've never really got Power Rangers and my french is atrocious - this film was not made to tick my boxes. It's 2023, why parody the Power Rangers now?? ^{[ BACK ]}

*² A thorny issue, but subtitles often make scripted comedies particularly challenging. Not only can the brevity of readable translation itself tangle the mechanics of a joke (as well as cultural differences affecting them), the viewer also loses the majority of the spoken intonation and - crucially - comic-timing. And despite its broad surrealism, Fumer Fait Tousser suffers here. ^{[ BACK ]}

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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
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