Mikel G. Gurpegui: Criticism of ‘Incredible but true’ (2022): Ants under the skin

2023-05-30 20:45:37

The Parisian Quentin Dupieux is a different filmmaker. Total author, since he is in charge of the production, script, photography and editing of his films (and this time not the music because he wanted to use an unknown techno LP that was as simple as it was hypnotic that he had at home). . Personal author because he unites humor and strangeness, sleepy costumbrismo and toy surrealism with singular self-confidence.

Incredible but true

• France. 2022. 74. (12). Comedy

• Direction, script and photography:
  Quentin Dupieux.

• Interpreters:
  Alain Chabat, Leah Drucker, Anais Demoustier, Benedict Magimel. Music: Jon Santo.

Dupieux, who after ‘Jaws’ last year released two films, ‘Smoking causes coughing’ and this one that went through the Week of Fantastic and Horror Films in San Sebastián, offers us in ‘Incredible but true’ a comedy that perhaps does not arouse laughter open, but some nervous laughter and an open mouth at an approach as absurd as attractive.

I better not spoil that starting point for you. It will be enough for them to know that a couple buys a house in the basement of which there is a sewer into which, if you enter, something prodigious happens that subverts the rules of space and, above all, of time. If you want, I will reveal the subplot: the main couple, who keep their treasure a secret, is related to another (he is a friend/boss of the first in an insurance brokerage) who does reveal a secret: he has been implanted in Japan an electronic penis.

‘Incredible but true’ offers barely an hour and a quarter of French cinema in a small, but robust, timeless format (even with a touch of Tati in his wordless scenes of repeated movements in the house), but current in its note on the obsessive cult to the body and youth. It may not take full advantage of its bizarre approach, but it may be liked as a small but coherent piece of bizarre cinema, and it dares to go darker in its final stretch. Classical surrealism already knew it: inside beautiful bodies there are ants.