The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the vaporettos are sailing and the festival-goers are watching films, but the tension is palpable on the Lido.
The fear of transforming the Mostra into a cinephile cluster prevents one from letting go.
We also remember gestures, contacts and emotions, probably a little.
How to be happy in an unhappy world?
Quentin Dupieux does not have the answer but he managed to make us forget for 77 minutes the pandemic, the social breakdown and the current stagnation.
Mandibules
, his new film presented out of competition on Saturday morning Sala Grande, triggered laughter and panicked the applaudimeter.
Since the selection of the
Daim
in Cannes last year, at the opening of the Directors' Fortnight, the French Dupieux is no longer unknown to international critics.
And the foreign press did not shy away from its pleasure with one of the rare comedies shown in Venice which, like all major festivals, is not the type to curl.
Read also: Pedro Almodóvar at the Mostra: "Going to the cinema is a collective adventure"
In
Mandibules
, we find Grégoire Ludig, the partner of Benoît Poelvoorde in
Au Poste!
, by the same Dupieux.
He does not have the "sick style" of Jean Dujardin in
Le Daim
.
Long hair and questionable beard, Manu sleeps on the beach.
He was offered a mission paid for 500 euros: to collect a suitcase from a man named Michel Michel and deliver it to someone.
He then steals a battered yellow Mercedes and takes his best friend Jean-Gab (David Marsais, his sidekick from Palmashow, also decked out in a terrible cut).
But as soon as they left, the two nickel-plated feet discovered a fly in the trunk of the car.
A fly the size of a large dog.
They then have a brilliant idea: to make sorrel with the fly by training it like a monkey.
“It's like a drone, it's even less boring than a drone, there are no batteries to put in it, and it gives us what we want.
"
After the serial-killer tire in
Rubber
, the tame fly in
Mandibles
?
Why not, Dupieux will stop at nothing and especially not in front of the most stupid ideas.
He has an incredible talent to transform them into absurd and delirious comedies.
As always, Dupieux looks at idiots with a certain tenderness.
Above all, he reminds us that they are not the craziest.
Normal people can also be nuts and irrational, and arguably more so.
Mandibles
thus takes on all its hilarious and disturbing strangeness when the idiotic duo find themselves invited to a house with a swimming pool by a group of friends who are apparently in good mental health.
Manu and Jean-Gab hide the fly from their hosts, baptized in the meantime Dominique and stupefied by sedatives, until Adèle Exarchopoulos discovers the bug.
A demented Adèle Exarchopoulos as a girl affected by a vocal problem since a skiing accident: she doesn't scream, she can't help speaking very loudly even while gritting her teeth.
It will not be revealed who ate the dog.
We will not reveal either the way in which Manu and Jean-Gab "check" each other (
"Taurus good night"
,
"Taurus lie"
,
"Taurus emotion"
...).
Note the presence of India Hair and rapper Romeo Elvis, convincing in a small role of badger (not the animal, the other).
Mandibles
looks like a David Cronenberg screenplay shot by the Farrelly brothers (
Dumb and Dumber period
).
Above all, it does not look like much known in the comedy landscape, if not like a Dupieux film and that's good.
The director will not have time to stroll in Venice.
On Monday, he is attacking the shooting of his new feature film,
Incredible but true,
with Léa Drucker, Alain Chabat and Anaïs Demoustier.
We can not wait to see that.