Smoking Causes Coughing (Glasgow Frightfest 2023)(Review)

Anyone who found this winter’s cycle of Oscar-bait movies about the magic of cinema rather too middlebrow may find respite in Quentin Dupieux’s Smoking Causes Coughing, the opening film at this year’s Glasgow FrightFest. Rather than the sanctified work of John Ford or Gene Kelly, Smoking Causes Coughing is inspired by Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, who the film’s alien-fighting squad Tobacco Force are an obvious parody of. Just because a film is a parody doesn’t mean it can’t be affectionate, though, and in its own way, the opening scene of Smoking Causes Coughing is as good at evoking childhood wonder as anything in The Fabelmans. A child on a long car journey urges his parents to pull over so he can watch Tobacco Force battling a Gamera-like monster in a nearby quarry. The look of awe on his face doesn’t fade, even when the creature’s death results in him being splattered with alien turtle guts.

Let no one say Dupieux doesn’t have a broad range of influences, though: he’s also clearly a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan. After the battle with the turtle monster nearly goes awry, Tobacco Force are contacted by their boss Chief Didier, voiced by Alain Chabat. A grotesque, slime-drooling rat puppet who’s always in bed with a different woman, he’s a revolting parody of Master Splinter. As ever in Dupieux’s work, nobody treats the assorted puppets, rubber-suit monsters or robots as anything other than a completely real character, and this is central to the film’s dry, absurd tone. The fact that Smoking Causes Coughing is a handsome-looking film, with an eye for memorable locations and gorgeous, sun-baked cinematography by the director himself, strangely makes the wilfully fake puppets easier to accept. Some things in the film look very lavish, other things look very cheap – but they’re all tangibly real, as defiantly analogue as the old-fashioned computer monitor Chief Didier makes his video call on.

Didier warns them that a powerful alien warlord – played, in an extended cameo, by Man Bites Dog‘s Benoît Poelvoorde – is on his way to Earth. Tobacco Force need to be in better fighting form in order to defeat him, so he packs them off to a team-building retreat. It’s a very funny idea, though the film never becomes the workplace comedy this twist seems to promise. Instead, Smoking Causes Coughing becomes an anthology film of sorts, as various team members and guests tell each other scary stories to pass the time.

Dupieux’s sensibility has been described as “random”, from his breakthrough soundtracking a puzzling Levi’s advert under his musical alias Mr Oizo, to his American work with randomness supremo Eric Wareheim, through to his no-less-perplexing run of French films like Keep an Eye Out and Deerskin. In many ways, Smoking Causes Coughing is random enough to be resistant to much analysis. Certain running themes emerge in the stories-within-stories: people crushed by the obligations of work and industry, family bonds under absurd pressure, and the mind-body split. But this all seems beside the point. You can hazard a guess as to where the idea for Tobacco Force came from: most 1980s and 1990s children’s shows were essentially long commercials, so why not take this to its unpalatable extreme and have a team of nicotine-powered superheroes? But once Dupieux has earned a laugh from the ridiculousness of the idea, he moves on. It’s not anything as rote or expected as a theme.

Those who enjoyed his feature debut Rubber for its self-reflexive theme may be disappointed: those who simply thought it was very funny will not. There is one shot in here, involving a robot terminating its mission, which made me laugh harder than any film I’ve seen in a long time. If some of the later stories didn’t get the same reaction (with one in particular, involving a man who feels no pain, definitely outstaying its welcome), it’s still possible to admire the range of ideas on offer. Dupieux’s move back to France has allowed him to build up an enviable stable of regular actors, most of whom appear here, from Chabat and Poelvoorde to the central quintet: Gilles Lellouche, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Oulaya Amamra, Vincent Lacoste and Anaïs Demoustier. Zadi, whose work has tended towards the kind of French comedies that don’t travel across the Atlantic, has a particularly enjoyable showcase as the guileless Mercure, while Demoustier is both hilarious and sympathetic as Nicotine. She fits perfectly into Dupieux’s world, which isn’t surprising; this is the second film she made with the director in 2022 alone.

A cross between Boccaccio’s Decameron and a tokusatsu serial, you’ve never seen anything like Smoking Causes Coughing before, unless you’ve seen a Quentin Dupieux movie before, in which case you have. It ends with a shrug rather than any cumulative statement, but that’s clearly the point, and it does leave us with a unique, probably-true take on machine learning regarding the team’s neurotic robot Norbert: “The more you say he’ll suck, the more he’ll suck!”

Graham’s Archive: Smoking Causes Coughing