Director/Screenplay/Photography – Quentin Dupieux, Producers – Vincent Mazel & Hugo Selignac, Music – Metronomy, Visual Effects/Fly Animation – Machine Molle (Supervisor – Jean-Francois Fontaine), Fly Design/Special Effects – CLSFX Atelier 69, Makeup Effects Supervisor – Olivier Afonso, Production Design – Joan Le Boru. Production Company – Chi-Fou-Mi Productions/Memento Film Productions/CB Films/Artemis Productions/VOO & Be tv/Shelter Prod/Canal+/OCS/C8/Cineaxe/Cinemage 14/Cofinova 16/Indefilms 8/Sofitvcine 7.
Cast
Gregoire Ludig (Manu/Fred Breton), David Marsais (Jean-Gab), Adele Exarchopoulos (Agnes), India Hair (Cecile Doyon), Bruno Lochet (Gilles), Romeo Elvis (Serge), Coralie Russier (Sandrine), Raphael Quenard (Raimondo), Philippe Dusseau (Michel-Michel), Jean-Paul Solal (Mr Wolf)
Plot
Manu is living homeless on the beach. A friend offers him money to go and pick up a suitcase and deliver it. In order to get there, Manu steals a car. He also invites his best friend Jean-Gab to join him. When they open the trunk of the car, they find a fly the size of a dog there. They decide to abandon their mission, believing they could find fame if they trained the fly. Lacking anywhere to train the fly, they take over the caravan of Gilles, but this burns down when Manu forgets the cooking on the stove. They continue on and are offered a ride by Cecile who is certain that Manu is a guy with which she went to school. They are taken to a party at her parents’ holiday home but problems are caused after they try to sneak the fly into the house.
Quentin Dupieux gained a reputation his third film Rubber (2010), an hilariously mind-bending meta-fiction about a killer car tire made in a deadpan absurd style. Dupieux subsequently went onto make Wrong (2012), Wrong Cops (2013), Reality (2014), Keep an Eye Out (2018), Deerskin (2019), Incredible But True (2022), Smoking Causes Coughing (2022), Daaaaaali! (2023) and Yannick (2023), all in the same gonzo surreal style.
The Quentin Dupieux film can be an acquired taste. Everyone loved Rubber but not all of those same audiences have stuck around to watch some of the latter day Dupieux entries. The surreal humour has quietened a little in the later films. It is still there but it is more of a low key deadpan bizarreness, of fairly straightforward plots where characters react to something bizarre with perfect normalcy – a talking deerskin coat, a time portal in the basement and, as here, a fly.
Mandibles plays out with this same deadpan normalcy and is the experiences of two likeable idiots (Gregoire Ludig, who could resemble a young Gerard Depardieu, and David Marsais) as they try to deal with a fly about as big as a medium-size dog. The fly is created via a series of surprisingly simple and modest practical effects – mostly puppetry or a dog in a costume and visual effects for when the fly briefly flies (its wings are bound throughout to economise on the need to provide these).
David Marsais and the fly
That said, Dupieux never much concerns himself with creating a biologically believable fly – it eats food normally rather than having to regurgitate to do so. It should also be pointed out that flies don’t actually have mandibles. On the other hand, the scene near the end where the package is finally delivered could well indicate that the titular mandibles are referring to something else altogether.
The early scenes are the two idiots – Dupieux says he based the characters on Dumb and Dumber (1994) – dealing with various situations – forcibly taking over a caravan (and then burning it down in a cooking fire); trying to obtain food supplies at gunpoint; and dealings with the caravan’s cranky owner. The film’s comedic heights are the scenes at the villa, in particular when the real Fred turns up. Here much of the show is stolen by an hilarious performance from Adele Exarchopoulos, best known as one of the lesbian couple in Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), as a girl who has a neurological condition that means she has to shout everything out. The scene where she is accused of eating the dog and is dragged away is side-splitting.
