Quentin Dupieux is a fascinating multihyphenate. For my generation, he emerged with the puppet Flat Eric and his dance single, flat beat. Since then, he emerged as a filmmaker and his first notable cut-through came in 2010’s Rubber A.K.A. The killer tyre movie, and in the decade since he’s continued to be one of the most reliably weird voices in European cinema. In 2022, he has two movies up his sleeve, the yet-to-be-released “Smoking Causes Coughing” and, fresh from frightfest, Incredible but True.
Frightfest is a horror & genre festival, and this is one of the most atypical films from a festival described as the Woodstock of gore. Incredible but true is a gentle comedy stretching a little over an hour with a light but incredible sci-fi idea at its core. Alain (Alain Chabat) and Marie (Léa Drucker) are a married couple buying a house together, and we join them whilst they are looking through the latest prospective house. A house, while lavish and perfectly acceptable for the modern french middle class, has a secret hidden within its walls, something that the estate agent goes to great lengths to sell. In the basement is a man-hole cover, which, if you go down it (with the door closed), you will travel forward in time 12 hours and, if that wasn’t enough, you will come out 3 days younger. The hard-to-understand aspect is you go underground but come out on the second floor. There’s also a B-plot in which Alain’s boss, Gerard (Benoît Magimel), has his penis changed for a mechanical one from Japan that you can control with your phone, only for it to malfunction after a visit to a firing range.
… besides being very funny, [it] touches on the stupid and barbaric things people do to themselves in the pursuit of material happiness.
There are some big ideas in Incredible but True, but structurally it is a much simpler affair unfolding more in the key of a lo-fi family drama. Alain negotiates a bothersome contract at work and struggles with the stress caused by a home life where his wife is forever absent, obsessed with the secret in the basement. More sporadically, Dupieux’s film visits Alain’s boss after his penis breaks after firing a shotgun at the shooting range. And the irony of breaking your penis while allegorically swinging it around in the company of other men touches upon what matters most in Incredible but true – this is a film more about subtext than wherever the story or characters may go.
At 70 minutes, Dupieux’s film is a case of subtext as text. Incredible but true may have some funky sci-fi concepts at play but make no mistake, this is a film about cosmetic surgery and pitfalls. With the time-travelling basement hole, he is talking about outward appearances – what does getting younger on the outside do to you on the inside? A question that goes much further than you’d expect, then again, this is the director whose other 2022 film is about a group of vigilantes called the “tobacco forces” falling apart. To rebuild team spirit, their leader suggests that they meet for a week-long retreat, before returning to save the world. And the subtext of a penis that can change to multiple sizes and can be driven through an app on your phone, besides being very funny, touches on the stupid and barbaric things people do to themselves in the pursuit of material happiness.
Incredible but true is a say-what-you-see title and explains what happens in the film rather neatly. But it is so light and airy it feels like little more than an episode of a theoretical sci-fi series such as black mirror, albeit one that isn’t so bleakly and unforgivingly satirical. In other words, within the confines of the go-go pace of a festival like frightfest, the perfect come-down or Sunday afternoon film.
