SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING: Get Ready To Inhale A Cloud Of Surreal Cinema

A killer tyre becomes infatuated with a woman and goes on a rampage across a desert town. A man acquires the deerskin jacket of his dreams and his obsession with this leads to murder. Two friends find a giant fly in the boot of their car and try to train the insect in the hope of making cash. These are just some of the flights of fancy narratives that have come from the mind of French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux, sounding akin to the type of peculiar dreams one might have after mainlining a hulk of cheese before bedtime.

Coming into the consciousness and perhaps best known to many as the man behind Mr. Oizo and the 1999 inescapable earworm Flat Beat, Dupieux has now created a body of work where each film is a trip to the surreal side of cinema. He has spawned an unpredictable and often eye-opening back catalogue of dark comedies, with each entry becoming stranger than the last. And with his latest effort, Smoking Causes Coughing, the French purveyor of oddball stories and worlds shows no signs of reigning in his phantastic proclivities.

Feel the (Tobacco) Force

The film begins with a family driving around an idyllic French countryside. When the couple’s young son asks to stop for a comfort break, he hears noises close by and stumbles across his favourite crime-fighting avengers doing battle with an enemy. The heroes are the Tobacco Force, a group clad in shiny jumpsuits with each member named after the compounds they carry – Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Nicotine (Anais Demoustier), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi), and Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra). When hand-to-hand combat against their foe, a giant turtle, doesn’t work, the Tobacco Force combines their compounds to give their enemy cancer and the amphibian bad guy explodes, covering the crime fighters and the family watching on the hilltop in turtle entrails. Sensing that his team is losing focus, their chief Didier, a talking rat that inexplicably drools green slime (voiced by Alain Chabet) instructs them to go on a week-long retreat to get back their team spirit.

From here, the film plays out in a scattershot patchwork of scenes and vignettes as the team tells campfire stories and tries to bond whilst an incoming threat from their biggest enemy yet, Lizardin (Benoit Poelvoorde), threatens to destroy the entire planet.

Tall Tales

Dupieux’s film is not concerned with developing characters, we spend time with the Tobacco Force but sketch very little about them as individuals aside from a brief glimpse at Benzene’s need to be seen as a good leader and Nicotine and Ammonia’s incomprehensible attraction to their rat leader. The film instead is concerned with freewheeling from one bizarre scene to another, the narrative spending a lot of the time on the weird tales they tell each other, even a barracuda that Benzene catches in the river has a chance to tell his own story whilst cooking on a grill.

These vignettes play out as if Tales of the Crypt took a heap of magic mushrooms in the woods where the Tobacco Force is residing but showcase Dupieux’s flair for dark, dark comedy. The first story features his off-kilter humour but also takes a chilling turn which makes you wonder, and yearn, for what a Quentin Dupieux full-on horror may look like. Meanwhile, the barracuda’s story involving a wood chipper has to be seen to be believed and fully commits to the comic gore which is labelled on the film’s classification certificate (perhaps the first time I have seen this description as part of a rating).

Puff Piece

There is a DIY aesthetic to Smoking Causes Coughing, from its costumes to the characters and set design. The Tobacco Force immediately draws to mind the Power Rangers with their all-in-one costumes and retro-futuristic helmets. That theme of a sci-fi but shot from a prism of the past continues with the design of the team’s bunker retreat (the outside looks like something from a 1960s genre piece). There is also a suicidal robot that accompanies the heroes that looks like an amalgamation of something from the TV show Lost in Space and Paulie’s birthday robot from Rocky IV. And Lizardin’s control centre looks like a set made from cardboard and held together with a wing and a prayer.

Depending on which side of the coin you land on and how much you are willing to go along with the film, you will either find this charming or too rudimentary. When a young girl comes across the Tobacco Force on their retreat, Benzene shows her one of their battles with a giant c*ckroach and she remarks on how it’s a big puppet and doesn’t look good. The film seemingly acknowledges its own absurdity and lo-fi nature and leans into this even more; it’s having fun with itself and asks the audience to join them. Or perhaps the greatest trick Dupieux ever pulled was putting a lot of effort into making something look so breezy and modest.

Conclusion:

You may at this stage be asking what is the actual point to any of this, a film so silly and slight may not hold enough cinematic merit for many tastes and it is one that depending on your palette or even your mood upon viewing, will either delight or irritate. But its deviation from the expected path of a superhero movie is a wacky wonder, there is no big final battle, no real lessons learned and the team effectively achieves nothing. For those with a nihilistic sensibility, there will be solace in the nothingness that comes from Smoking Causes Coughing, just a goofy grin from a good time had and the feeling that it is all one big joke. And if that joke begins to wear thin, with such a lean runtime, it is over before you know it.

Smoking Causes Coughing was released in theatres in the US and UK on July 7, 2023. 

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