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PostPosted: Sat Mar 13, 2021 9:05 am 
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QUENTIN DUPIEUX: MANDIBLES/MANDIBULES (2020) - RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA 2021

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DAVID MARSAIS AND GRÉGOIRE LUDWIG IN MANDIBLES

This time a Dupieux film that's actually fun to watch and talk about

Having reviewed three of Dupieux's oddball films, Reality (2014), Keep an Eye Out (2018) and Deerskin (2019), and now watched Mandibles, I have an idea of the cruelty, buffoonery, and ingenuity of this sui generis and determinedly uncommercial French director's œuvre, though since he has ten features, and each film is different from the last, I can't confidently generalize about the whole range of it. One may observe that with Keep an Eye Out his US reviews improved, going from Metacritic 50's (or 20's) to 60's, 62 for that one, 65 for Deerskin. This may reflect a mellowing of the manner, but also quite likely the growth of a more receptive Anglophone audience of critics aware of Dupieux's toung-in-cheek midnight movie cult potential and poised to enjoy it. Mandibles clearly focuses less on the ingenuity and more on the buffoonery. I confess to having fun, and not looking at my watch. And the Metascore has gone up a whole ten points this time.

MAndibles focuses on two lawless losers; it's a buddy picture, and that gets it away from the terrible isolation of Deerskin and its toxically egocentric protagonist whom even the bland Jean Dujardin couldn't make palatable. The tall, unshaven, longhaired Manu (Grégoire Ludig) and his pote Jean-Gab (David Marsais) - note the cozy names - are pals who knuckle-bump constantly to declare their friendship. WTF? If their get-rich schemes fail, who cares? Life is good. And they've got each other. There is also sociability later when a woman thinks Manu is her old friend Fred, and for a while Manu and Jean-Gab are adopted by her weird family and stay in their roomy hoouse.

This is technically a goofy sci-fi film and replacing the MacGuffin of the deerskin jacket last time is a giant fly, yes, a fly the size of a hefty dog, which turns up in the beat-up light yellow Mercedes Manu hot wires. (By the way, Dupieux uses a image processing again that makes the whole thing look like a faded seventies B picture.) Or perhaps this is magic reality. It's not Kafka. Nobody's transformed into this fly. They decide it's a girl, name her Dominique, and adopt her as a captive pet that Jean-Gab pets and prepares to train so they can use her like a drone that can steal stuff and make them rich.

This is a secondary plot that becomes the primary mover of the story. The initial gig is to transfer a briefcase between two shady businessmen. The contents of it, when revealed, may be something of a letdown, though still strange and glitzily criminal in flavor. But the fun is getting there, and when that's done, after much delays, there's still Dominique.

Dominique (spoiler alert!) at one point eats a small dog, while Manu and Jean-Gab are staying at the house, with pool, of the woman who thinks Manu is Fred. Only the family concludes, by odd circumstances, that the dog was eaten by one of their number, the brain-damaged Agnès (Adèle Exarchopoulos of Blue Is the Warmest Color), whose condition causes her to shout when she talks, and be overexcited. The family's decision to have Agnès taken away may seem cruel, but she enjoys being heavily sedated: it makes her voice return to normal and her speech become calm.

The Dupieux cruelty is held in check by the buddyhood and the inemptitude, except early on, when Manu and Jean-Gab steal a man's trailer house and tie him up, and then while trying to cook dinner Manu torches the trailer and they abandon it. Dupieux extracts no menace or cruelty from the giant fly and equally refrains from making her cute. A couple of brief glimpses of things through Dominique's multifaceted eyes is bracingly strange. Indeed one of the criticisms is that Dupieux doesn't make sufficient imaginative use of the fly, but his skill is not of imagination but of working out premises, and this time he has done us the kindness of one that leads to harmless pleasure.

Mandibles/Mandibules,77 mins., debuted at Venice; showed also in Germany's Fantasy Filmfest, Sitges Catalonia, Busan, Thessaloniki, and (virtual) Rotterdam, and is scheduled for US release May 7 2021. Screened online at home for this review as part of the all-virtual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Mar. 12, 2021. Metascore: 75%.

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