Incredible but True, 2022.
Written and directed by Quentin Dupieux.
Starring Alain Chabat, Léa Drucker, Benoît Magimel, and Anaïs Demoustier.
SYNOPSIS:
Alain and Marie moved to the suburb house of their dreams. But the real estate agent warned them: what is in the basement may well change their lives forever.
French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux’s one-man industry of singularly weird films is certainly showing no sign of stopping. The first of the director’s two features releasing this year, Incredible but True is hardly among his very finest work, but nevertheless sees him again using his trademark absurdism to poignantly explore the depths of the human soul.
This jaunty, to-the-point 74-minute romp chronicles the middle-aged ennui of a suburban couple, Alain (Alain Chabat) and Marie (Léa Drucker), who upon preparing to buy a new home discover a most unexpected hidden feature in the basement. It won’t be spoiled here, but needless to say it forces Alain and Marie to reconsider the nature of both their relationship and their very lives.
What initially appears to be a satire of the perils of homeownership quickly switch-foots to become a quirky relationship drama powered by a stinging – and stingingly funny – examination of the ravages of time, and the drastic measures one might take to fight the tide of nature.
It’s worth getting out of the way that this isn’t nearly as off-the-wall as, say, Rubber or Mandibles – which revolved around a sentient tire and giant fly respectively – and ultimately perhaps Dupieux’s most accessible story to date. It’s easy to picture this as a Black Mirror episode with some stylistic and tonal reworkings, even.
Yet Dupieux’s absurdist deadpan vibe has gone nowhere; he’s a master of playing out a long, po-faced setup all the way to a gut-busting punchline, and again proves he isn’t afraid to get deeply silly in the same breath. For instance, a major subplot involves Alain’s boss Gérard (Benoît Magimel) being fitted with an electronic penis controlled by a phone app in order to satisfy his perennially horny younger girlfriend Jeanne (Anaïs Demoustier).
Dupieux’s cast serves him well throughout, refusing to offer even the faintest hint that they’re in on the joke even though, ostensibly, we know they are. Léa Drucker is especially compelling as the anguished Marie; a woman torn between her marriage and a deep desire to better herself with the help of the magic basement.
This is a tragicomedy that never forgets its characters’ inner humanity, as they wrestle with the tumult of mid-life crises while also coming to learn just how green the grass truly is on the other side.
Per usual for Dupieux, this is a stately, restrained piece of work from a filmmaking perspective; the camerawork seems relatively unfussy yet is certainly well composed, serving its purpose while not distracting us from the strangeness of the story.
The film concludes with a lengthy nonverbal montage in which various situations play out while backed by Jon Santo’s wonderfully offbeat musical score, and were it a filmmaker other than Dupieux, you might wonder if the third act of the movie got damaged at the lab and the surviving material had to be stitched together into a meaningful collage. Somehow, as ever, he makes such a potentially deflating denouement work.
There are certainly those who would love to see a longer, more fleshed-out take on this film’s delicious central hypothetical, yet the concision and restraint on Dupieux’s part remain admirable; this thing just ups and ends as soon as he’s said everything he wants to.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
