Smoking Causes Coughing is ostensibly a riff on Power Rangers/Super Sentai, Ultraman, and other tokusatsu-style media in which spandex-clad superheroes battle intergalactic monsters, but — as is the case with writer-director Quentin Dupieux’s (Rubber, Deeskin) entire filmography — his latest genre-bending slice of French absurdity is predictably unpredictable.
The Tobacco Force is a team of avengers in which each of its five members represents a different chemical found in cigarettes: Benzene (Gilles Lellouche, Love Me If You Dare), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi), and Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra). When they’re unable to defeat an enemy in hand-to-hand combat, they call upon their powers — which only work when they’re sincere — to infect their foe with cancer to the point of bodily combustion.
The Tobacco Force has a mentor in Chief Didier (voiced by Alain Chabat, The Science of Sleep). He’s a wise, mutant rat, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles‘ Splinter, except Didier is a womanizer that drools green goo. (“It could be detergent or acid,” a character ponders.) The team is also accompanied by an robot assistant, Norbert 500, until it commits suicide and is replaced with a newer — but still ineffective — model, Norbert 1200 (both voiced by second assistant director Ferdinand Canaud).
Running the risk of becoming increasingly individualistic, Didier orders the squad to embark on a retreat in a luxurious underground base — complete with titanium beds, sea water showers, and a supermarket fridge, which houses a woman that serves food and drinks 24/7 — to boost the team’s spirit before a formidable villain known as Lazardin (Benoît Poelvoorde, Man Bites Dog) attempts to destroy the planet.
As the narrative is picking up in the second act, Smoking Causes Coughing introduces heretofore unexpected anthological tendencies as the fivesome start swapping spooky stories around a campfire. The first vignette sees a sensory-depriving “thinking helmet” from 1930 turn a vacationing young woman (Adèle Exarchopoulos, Blue Is the Warmest Colour) into a serene slasher. And just when the movie seems to be settling into an anthology format, an about-face back to the main narrative thread occurs.
But it’s not long before another story comes, this time told by a talking barracuda (voiced by Franck Lascombes) while it’s being cooked. The tale involves a good-natured young man (Anthony Sonigo) being slowly crushed by an industrial grinder, despite his hapless aunt’s (Blanche Gardin) best efforts. A final vignette, albeit one directly connected to the main story, shows Lazardin aboard his retro-futuristic spaceship where he faces a foe worse than the Tobacco Force: his family. Less than a third of the 80-minute runtime is dedicated to these asides, so they’re more like fragmentary storytelling quirks than anthology segments.
Smoking Causes Coughing brings to mind Psycho Goreman in its blend of absurdist humor, buckets of gore, and rubber monsters. The latter — which range from the Gamera-esque Tortusse to a giant cockroach — are portrayed by special makeup effects artist Olivier Afonso (As Above So Below, Raw) in intentionally schlocky creature suits. An impressed girl says, “It’s a rubber monster. It’s all mushy.” Didier is a crude puppet, with his salacious persona adding to the deadpan humor.
In some ways, Smoking Causes Coughing explores the power of storytelling, so Dupieux gives viewers stories inside of stories. The big final battle one would expect from the superhero setup is subverted, and the lack of payoff may leave some dissatisfied — but the anti-conclusion is a punchline in harmony with the folly that proceeds it, and its ambiguity leaves the door open for more. Unlikely though it may be, the Tobacco Force could make for a wildly entertaining framing device for an anthology series.
The post ‘Smoking Causes Coughing’ Review – Absurdist Humor, Buckets of Gore, and Rubber Monsters! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.