Director/Screenplay/Photography – Quentin Dupieux, Producer – Hugo Selignac, Visual Effects Supervisor – Sebastien Rame, Visual Effects – MPPC Film & Episodic, Special Effects Supervisor – Julian Poncet de la Grave, Monsters & Effects – Olivier Afonso, Norbert 500 & 1200 Created by Gustav Hoegen, Production Design – Joan Le Boru. Production Company – Chi-Fou-Mi Productions/Gaumont/Canal+/OCS/TMC/Le Region Provence-Alpes Cote d’Azur/CNC/Le Pays de Martigue – Metropole Aix-Marseille Provence.
Cast
Gilles Lellouche (Benzene), Oulaya Amamra (Ammonia), Anais Demoustier (Nicotine), Jean-Pascal Zadi (Mercury), Vincent Lacoste (Methanol), Alain Chabat (Voice of Chief Didier), Blanche Garden (Aunt Tony), Anthony Sinigo (Michael), Raphael Quenard (Max), Marie Bunel (Caissiere), Gregoire Ludig (Christophe), Adele Exarchopoulos (Celine), Jerome Niel (Bruno), Doria Tillier (Agathe), Tanguy Mercier (Kid), David Marsais (Father of the Kid), Julia Foure (Mother of the Kid), Marie Brunel (The Cashier), Ferdinand Canaud (Voice of Norbert 500 & Norbert 1200), Benoit Poelvoorde (Lezardin), Olivier Afonso (Tortusse), Themis Terrier-Thiebaux (Josette), Benoite Chivot (Lezardine), Jules Dhios-Francisco (Lezardou)
Plot
A family are on a road trip when the young boy asks to stop to go to the toilet on the roadside. The boy becomes excited when he sees the superhero team Tobacco Force fighting the monster Tortusse nearby. Each of the Tobacco Force team has the ability to unleash a toxic substance and they combine these to defeat the monster. Afterwards, the members of Tobacco Force are told by their rat chief Didier to go on a team-building vacation to prepare for the next big threat. As they sit around the campfire, they tell various stories. In one story, two married couples get away to a house for the weekend. There Agathe finds a Thinking Helmet that is supposed to offer peace and calm of mind. However, once she places it on, she refuses to take it off. Others tell the story of Tony, a plant supervisor, whose nephew Michael became stuck in the shredder. Tony tried to reverse the machine, only to cause more and more of Michael’s body parts ground down.
French director 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 the likes of Wrong (2012), Wrong Cops (2013), Reality (2014), Keep an Eye Out (2018), Deerskin (2019), Mandilbles (2020), Incredible But True (2022), Daaaaaali! (2023) and Yannick (2023), all in the same gonzo surreal style.
Dupieux’s last few films have not been as out there as Rubber. They work in terms of a single bizarre idea which everyone plays with perfect normalcy as Dupieux keeps placing absurd complications on top of it. By contrast, Smoking Causes Coughing feels like it was comprised of several ideas that were floating around in Dupieux’s head that he wasn’t able to develop enough to work as full-length films. It is a film made up of fragments and vignettes that are united in a wraparound as stories being told around a campfire while the superhero team are on a lakeside retreat.
The main wraparound story is construed as a parody of the Superhero Film. Tobacco Force come across as somewhere between the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and tv’s Ultraman, dressed in form-fitting tight suits in primary colours with visored helmets as they beat up deliberately cheesy-looking alien monsters. Like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they are overseen by a talking rat, although in this case it is a deliberately unconvincing puppet that is seen in bed with assorted women, even making out with them, while both of the female members of the team appear to have a crush on it.
Tobacco Force battle Tortusse
The first of the stories is the rather odd one where Doria Tillier, her husband and friends go to stay at a vacation home where she puts on a helmet she finds and then refuses to remove it. Following various attempts by the others to cut it off, she turns and starts killing them, having had her views expanded by the mindfulness promised by the helmet. The episode ends as she tracks the last two down under a swimming pool cover and kills them. This is sort of a “huh” episode that doesn’t quite come off. Even slighter is a piece told by a young girl (Tanguy Mercier) who encounters the team at the campfire and starts telling a story about a fish, but this ends abruptly before it even begins. The fish may well be the same barracuda that Gilles Lellouche catches with his hands while swimming in the lake, which starts talking after he puts it on the stove to cook.
The jewel of the film is the story about Blanche Garden, a supervisor at some kind of plant, who finds that the nephew Anthony Sinigo she has employed has become caught inside a shredder. This is an episode where Dupieux keeps piling absurdity upon absurdity to a point of absolute perfection. This goes from Singio with his feet caught in the shredder as Blanche tries to reverse the machinery to get him out only to get him even further drawn in, he all the while insisting that he is fine. This continues to the point where he is no more than a pair of lips in a bucket of gore as she takes him back to his mother. On the way, he asks for a cigarette but this causes him to have to vomit half his contents out of the bucket on the roadside, before the episode reaches a perfect punchline.
The superhero wraparound ends with the various superheroes having been told that the End of the World is imminent due to the invasion by Lizardin. We cut to Lizardin, played by Belgian actor Benoit Poelvoorde, who is interrupted in his invasion plans by a call for dinner from his wife and daughter. The emergency appears to be subverted when the wife and daughter poison him with the soup they serve up for dinner.
