Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Quentin Dupieux
Starring: Alain Chabat, Léa Drucker, Benoît Magimel, Anaïs Demoustier
A sentient tyre goes on a killing spree. A man becomes obsessed with
ridding the world of every jacket save for his own treasured
deerskin. Two friends train a giant fly to pull off bank heists. You certainly
can't accuse French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux of not coming up
with arresting ideas. What you can sometimes accuse him of is failing to
stretch those ideas to a justifiable feature length. Such is the case
with his latest, Incredible but True, which boasts a setup Rod Serling would be proud of but which begins
to wear a bit thin by the hour mark.
That setup sees married couple Alain (Alain Chabat) and Marie
(Léa Drucker) view a house with a very special feature. As the
estate agent (Stéphane Pézerat) reveals, in the basement is a
manhole that opens to reveal a tunnel. Thing is, once you emerge from
the tunnel you find yourself not in some underground cavern but on the
top floor of the house. Not only that, but you've just jumped ahead 12
hours in time. Oh, and you're also three days younger.
It's the latter benefit that attracts Marie to the tunnel. After she
and Alain move in, she becomes obsessed with taking trips down the
tunnel, constantly checking herself in the mirror for any visible signs
of de-aging. She becomes convinced her breasts are getting firmer, but
Alain claims he can feel no difference. With Marie losing 12 hours every
time she enters the tunnel, Alain finds himself living with a wife he
only sees for a few minutes every evening as she gradually does indeed
begin to age backwards.
A subplot sees Alain's horndog boss Gerard (Benoît Magimel)
undergo surgery to have a certain part of his anatomy "enhanced" with
electronic technology, much to the approval of his younger girlfriend
Jeanne (Anaïs Demoustier). Through the two story strands, Dupieux
examines our desire to maintain our youth and the desperate measures
we'll take to do so. Alain refuses to use the tunnel, as he's quite
happy going old and grey. Alain simply wants to be left alone to enjoy
life, something he gets to do with his wife practically never around as
she bathes in the fountain of youth. One telling montage sees an
increasingly graying Alain enjoying the simple pleasures of fishing by a
lake with a dog at his side while Marie, at this point resembling a
teenager, drives herself mad in her quest to become a model.
While it's essentially an absurdist satire, a final reveal sees
Incredible but True take a turn into the realm of body
horror. It's a twist worthy of EC Comics, but I suspect it would have
had more impact if it came at the end of a 30 minute segment of a horror
anthology rather than a 74 minute feature film.
That's not to say Incredible but True is ever dull. Even
in some passages where it feels Dupieux is struggling to stretch out his
story, the performances of his central quartet keep us involved with
their commitment to his unique vision. With his earlier American shot
films, you got the sense that the actors weren't quite sure what they
were involved in, which admittedly sometimes added to the absurdist
quality. Since he's recently begun working in his homeland, he's been
able to assemble casts that are fully tuned into his wavelength. It's
hard to imagine any American actor pulling off Jean Dujardin's
performance from Deerskin, and likewise, Chabat, Drucker, Magimel and Demoustier inhabit their
quirky roles in a manner few actors outside of France could do with such
conviction. The highlight of the film sees all four gathered around a
dinner table for a revelation that Dupieux stretches out with the skill
of Hitchcock teasing his audience with the threat of a bomb about to
detonate.
Incredible But True is on MUBI UK now.