Smoking Causes Coughing (Quentin Dupieux, 2022) (Patreon)

The title Smoking Causes Coughing is a statement of direct causation. Doing this will lead to that. This is ironic, because nothing in Smoking Causes Coughing leads to anything else. It is, as they used to say, so random.

The thing about Quentin Dupieux is, he really does not give a single fuck. In many respects, his most successful and coherent artistic statement is his hit single "Flat Beat," under his Mr. Oizo pseudonym. It is, indeed, a single electronic riff, never changing, just thumping along for about three minutes. It's so delightfully half-assed it's hard not to be charmed by it. And for the most part, his films exhibit the same aesthetic: unformed ideas, heavy on some particular gimmick, staged and shot exactly as Dupieux jotted them down on a random rolling paper. (If Alain Guiraudie ever went into sketch comedy, it might look a lot like this.)

Smoking Causes Coughing is another high-concept lark, a sort of cinematic container for a bunch of mini-narratives that never go anywhere and certainly never intersect. The film is ostensibly about a crew of five Power Rangers ripoffs who are called the Tobacco Force. By harnessing the lethal power of the toxins in cigarettes, they kill sub-Godzilla mutant foes, their foam-rubber suits exploding in a cascade of fake blood and alien guts. They work for a drooling rat puppet named Didier, an obvious spoof of Master Shredder from the Ninja Turtles.

It's all patently idiotic, and might have become actively annoying were it not for Dupieux's wise decision to keep the running time to a trim 80 minutes (and that includes about six minutes of opening and end credits). Didier decides the Force is lacking in cohesion, so he sends them to a team-building retreat, which mostly becomes an excuse for the various members (and a few random walk-ons, including a plastic barracuda) to tell "scary stories," which Smoking cuts away to visualize. However, calling this an anthology film would give it far too much credit. That implies a modicum of structural commitment, and that's not Dupieux's game.

After these digressions -- a woman (Adèle Exarchopoulos) who discovers a "thinking hat" that dissociates her mind from her body; a sawmill owner (Blanche Gardin) whose young nephew (Anthony Sonigo) falls into a wood chipper but keeps somehow surviving; a fish watching someone pour poison directly into its lake -- the Tobacco Force learns that their archenemy Lézardin (Benoît Poelvoorde) plans to destroy the earth, but then, well, he doesn't. Nothing that happens in Smoking Causes Coughing is of any consequence whatsoever. 

Many of you would loathe this film, but I found it a pleasant diversion. Truth is, Dupieux's rate of output is outstripping his ability to form actual ideas, and this perhaps makes him the Takashi Miike of our age. If Deerskin was Mr. Oizo's Audition, think of Smoking as his Visitor Q.