Review: Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles Is a Pretty Fly Chorus of Farce and Pathos

Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles pivots on another of the filmmaker’s pointedly irrational premises, suggesting that a housefly the size of a large dog can be domesticated as a pet. The fly in question is discovered in the trunk of a stolen jalopy by two amateur criminals, Manu (Grégoire Ludig) and Jean-Gab (David Marsais), who are in the midst of executing an inept drop-off that brings to mind the inciting incident of Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski. Rather than settle for 500 euros from the drop-off, Jean-Gab suggests that they train the fly to serve as a drone, executing untraceable bank robberies.

Dupieux charmingly and casually blends these and other seemingly incompatible narrative ingredients. And there’s a particular poignancy in the notion of treating a creature as loathed as a fly with respect, positioning it as an instrument of redemption for contemptible idiots. One can imagine the gross-out shocks that the Dupieux who made Deerskin and Keep an Eye Out might spring with a giant insect, but here he occasionally leans into the pabulum of a “magical animal” narrative, juxtaposing it with Manu and Jean-Gab’s funny pettiness.

Like the Farrelly brothers, Dupieux nurtures our kinship with misfits only to expose their selfishness and challenge our sentimentality with acts of superbly timed cruelty. Early in Mandibles, Manu and Jean-Gab seize an old man’s (Bruno Lochet) trailer in order to train the fly, and in the middle of a conversation Manu headbutts the man, disregarding their flimsy pretense of a negotiation. The moment is uproarious because Manu’s decisiveness is a shock given his schlubby and noncommittal demeanor, imbuing the violence with a WTF quality.

Another act of cruelty is more daring and characteristic of Dupieux’s prior work, inviting—or perhaps goading—the audience to disconnect from an often agreeably rambling road movie. Manu and Jean-Gab are inexplicably taken in by the poised and attractive Cécile (India Hair), who mistakes Manu for someone she slept with in high school. This is all redolent of the Farrellys’ Dumb and Dumber, in which higher society people also mistook two hilariously obvious bums for compatriots—a development that, in both that film and Mandibles, works to parody affluent self-absorption. Pointedly, Agnès (Adèle Exarchopoulos), the one unfortunate person in Cécile’s orbit, sees through Manu and Jean-Gab, though she voices her suspicions so shrilly and literal-mindedly as to be discarded and eventually sabotaged.

Agnès was injured in a ski accident and can only speak via shouting (another absurdism that recalls the Farrellys), and her ailment clearly fosters irritation and resentment in her clique. It’s a realistic reaction to disabilities in loved ones that many films are too timid to acknowledge. And she is insufferable, though Dupieux and especially Exarchopoulos never allow the audience to write Agnès off as a joke. They see her as a tragic, miserable figure, longing for connection, even while scoring slapstick points on her.

This is the stratagem of Mandibles at large, as punchlines and pathos intermingle with uncomfortable closeness throughout its runtime, nurturing an unresolved tension that suggests nothing less than the amoral chaos of life. What Manu and Jean-Gab allow to happen to Agnès is unforgiveable, and their actions in this regard almost steer the film into the terrain of a psychological thriller, though Dupieux continues to encourage us to root for them as disreputable everymen, which is easy to do given the charisma of Ludig and Marsais.

Which is to say that Dupieux hasn’t gone as soft as the ironically cute animal premise of the film might initially lead one to believe. By embracing conventional buddy-movie elements, Dupieux imbues his surreal shards of incident with more bite. In many of his films, our guard is up from frame one, and though you might miss the piercing, almost mathematical precision of something like Keep an Eye Out, the idle one-thing-after-another-ness of Mandibles is evocative, disturbing, and moving. Manu and Jean-Gab reach an optimistic ending without deserving one, suggesting that awful people don’t necessarily meet awful ends or, less reductively, that all of us every-people do both commendable and awful things, even if we unquestionably regard ourselves as the stalwart protagonists of our own lives. We can discern the personality of a monster bug while writing off the person in need right under our noses.