'Incredible but true': unusual and stupendous nonsense about the decay of the body

2023-05-19T04:32:46.123Z

Highlights: French director Quentin Dupieux's new film is, like almost all of his, a crazy comedy about a very sane subject. A supernatural comedy of short film, barely an hour and 10 minutes, although far-reaching, about the arrival of a mature marriage (around 50 years old) to a new house with surprise inside. A home that from a superficial perspective could be related to the jocular situation of This house is a ruin, but in reverse, and that in a deeper plane could take us to the mythical 7th and a half floor of How to be John Malkovich.

French director Quentin Dupieux's new film is, like almost all of his, a crazy comedy about a very sane subject.

Reviews of absurd films have a problem: if you quote and even explain the nonsense, you end up with the surprise. Here is a real problem with gutting and surprises, and not telling if this or that character happens to this or that. Even so, let's try a critique of Incredible but true without revealing too much, praising its virtues, which it has and many, and relativizing its defects, which it also has, because its authenticity, its freedom and its originality deserve it.

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What are the French laughing at?

The new film by the unusual French director Quentin Dupieux is, like almost all of his, a crazy comedy about a very sane subject. Here, the decay of the body and, therefore, of the spirit. A supernatural comedy of short film, barely an hour and 10 minutes, although far-reaching, about the arrival of a mature marriage (around 50 years old) to a new house with surprise inside. A home that from a superficial perspective could be related to the jocular situation of This house is a ruin, but in reverse, and that in a deeper plane could take us to the mythical 7th and a half floor of How to be John Malkovich. That is, to the absurdity of Charlie Kaufman.

In spite of everything, there is another work that would connect perfectly with the story and with the background of Incredible but true, and which we will not dare to cite as a reference of Dupieux because it is not easy for the French director to have read or seen it represented: the wonderful Four hearts with brake and reverse, by Enrique Jardiel Poncela. There are in Dupieux, in a less expansive and more musty way, or even bland, if you like, without this entailing an entirely negative connotation, relevant nuances of the humor of Jardiel and his companions of the Other Generation of 27. In fact, there could also be aspects of the hilarious Miracle in the house of the López, by Miguel Mihura, in the film that opens today in cinemas after winning the award for best screenplay at the Sitges Festival, a contest that usually pampers the director of Smoking causes cough (also created in 2022 and with awards there), Jaws and The Deerskin Jacket. Movies in which his characters could obsess to desperate love with a garment that acquired its own will, or find a giant fly in his car and then train it in order to make money.

Also a DJ as well as a writer and film director, a facet in which he transforms with the pseudonym of Mr. Oizo, Dupieux uses to illustrate his film musically a series of strange pieces created in 1976 by Jon Santo (alias of Andres Beurmann) that, rather than accompany, contrast with what is happening: baroque compositions by Bach, played with synthesizers, but somewhat distant in tone to that of Wendy Carlos with Beethoven and Purcell in A Clockwork Orange. Although perhaps the most surprising thing about Dupieux is, in addition to the surreal tone of the story, the mechanics used in a part of the sequences with the information that is given: the protagonists know something that the viewer does not know, and the director extends his unveiling to exhaustion, with the consequent suspense, nervousness and even comedy of the situation.

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Apotheosically strange, and of a singular slowness that at times can be desperate, Incredible but true also has its climax in an anticlimax: when it seems that the third act of the story arrives and everything is going to develop, the director risks with a musical sequence of 10 minutes, articulated based on continuous ellipsis, in which the conventional exhibition of what happens to the protagonist marriage is hidden from the viewer, And comes the abrupt and magnificent end. Now, the conclusion is clear: the elixir of youth does not exist, inside we have been rotten for a long time.