REVIEW: Fumer fait tousser [Smoking Causes Coughing] [2022]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 77 minutes
Release Date: November 30th, 2022 (France) / March 31st, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Gaumont / Magnet Releasing
Director(s): Quentin Dupieux
Writer(s): Quentin Dupieux

Why are you wearing weird outfits?

While Quentin Dupieux always operates in the realm of absurdity, he generally does so with a strong narrative base. His characters find or want some impossible thing and they react accordingly for hijinks, metaphysical ruminations, and surreal insanity. That’s not the case with his latest Smoking Causes Coughing.

Here there’s merely a premise with which to springboard off—a narrative device manufactured in such a way that he can throw multiple short-form ideas against the wall and not have to worry which stick. Because not sticking is the point. Each vignette is a distraction. A lark. Dupieux writes his characters as vessels to tell wild tales, each one an excuse to create an anthology of bloody laughs that we assume didn’t quite have the legs to become full-fledged features themselves.

As a result, of the six of his films I’ve seen, it’s definitely the slightest. That doesn’t, however, mean it’s any less entertaining. It can’t be with a bonkers template bolstered by even more bonkers interludes. The whole is a campier riff on the already campy “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” conceit with a quartet of heroic avengers fighting giant plastic monsters in desolate areas via their conjoined power of causing cancer.

That’s right. Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), Nicotine (Anäis Demoustier), Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi), and Menthol (Vincent Lacoste) each have the ability to emit a cancerous cloud of smoke from their fists to jumpstart an explosively malignant death in their enemies. They’re an anti-smoking billboard in action, killing alien creatures like Tortusse with the same chemicals Big Tobacco pumps into smokers.

And yet it’s all a red herring. It’s a vehicle towards adding gory, R-rated viscera to kid show battles and spoofing the goofy sci-fi environments the genre wields. Because despite meeting the Tobacco Force in the throes of victory, not all is well within their ranks. Their Chief (Alain Chabat’s grotesque rat puppet Didier) has run the numbers and found a mounting discord that could risk catastrophe.

So, he sends them on a work retreat to an isolated lake spot with a live-in staffed supermarket fridge (Marie Bunel) and titanium beds. Throw them all together for a week with their egos, insecurities, sexual desires, and longing for family and things could get heated if not for an unplanned imperative to also tell scary stories—a task none of them are good at when being weird comes much more naturally.

Cue “The Thinking Cap” with Doria Tillier, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Grégoire Ludig, and Jérôme Niel or “Nephew in a Bucket” with Blanche Gardin and Anthony Sonigo. Even a little girl arrives to depress everyone with a brief interlude about mankind’s pollutive greed—the most obvious hint at Dupieux consciously injecting his film with timely and relevant commentary despite its bizarre packaging allowing you to simply watch and laugh.

With talking fish, suicidal robots, and rodent lotharios, the latter is ultimately the path of least resistance. And why not? Dupieux isn’t standing on a soapbox. He’s merely bringing reality into his darkly imaginative chaos. If you learn something from Benzene and Menthol’s satirical rejection of “woke-ness” and faux allyship respectively or a young boy’s unhinged fanatical allegiance to superheroes at his own peril, even better.