You’d be forgiven for assuming from its trailer that Smoking Causes Coughing really is about a team of “avengers” codenamed for the cancerous chemicals with which they fight crime—if by “crime” we mean a bumbling kaiju tortoise and cockroach. Together, Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra), Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi), and Methanol (Vincent Lacoste) make up the Tobacco Force, whose matching powder-blue outfits belie the banal corporate structure of their organization. It’s only after Chief Didier (voiced by Alain Chabat), their womanizing, acid-drooling rat boss, sends them on a retreat to rebuild their “group cohesion,” that the film reveals its hand.
Merely skewering the superhero genre would be a task meaty enough for any filmmaker to tackle, but, as it turns out, writer-director Quentin Dupieux has more overarching concerns. Smoking Causes Coughing isn’t just an anti-superhero superhero film, but, thanks to Tristram Shandy-like levels of discursivity, something akin to an anti-film.
While on their retreat, Tobacco Force’s members tell each other scary stories around the campfire, each of which takes the form of a film-within-the-film. In essence a shorts compilation, the cinematic equivalent of a fix-up novel, Smoking Causes Coughing flaunts its self-interrupting narrative. The frustration this may arouse in the viewer—combined with a deadpan tone that bathes the galactic and the anodyne, the stupid and the blackly comedic, in one and the same balmy atmosphere—is partially what gives the film its comedic edge.
Broadly speaking, these films-within-the-film are horror with an absurdist bent. In one, two couples vacationing at a villa discover a “Thinking Helmet” from 1930 in a towel closet. After trying on the helmet, one of the women (Doria Tillier) retreats into a Cartesian detachment from base material reality that culminates in a murder spree. In another, the owner of a sawmill (Blanche Gardin) accidentally reduces her nephew (Anthony Sonigo) to a pair of lips floating in a bucket of gore—while the lips repeatedly insist it doesn’t hurt at all. The experience even becomes a bonding opportunity for them until she attempts to return him to his mother’s apartment and drops the bucket when the buzzer startles her.
More a conception of the world than a genre in itself, Dupieux’s absurdism infiltrates genres that it has no business getting mixed up with and torques them to comedic effect. It’s telling, for instance, that the Tobacco Force’s cancerous powers wax or wane based on how sincerely each member is treating the fight at hand—sincerity being the default tone that superhero films strike no matter how outlandish their premises. And whereas horror sets out to shock its audience, absurdism treats nothing as especially shocking or even surprising.
As a result of its fragmentary structure, the film isn’t able to develop its characters enough to be satisfying as an exploration of identity, interpersonal relationships, and psychology. But, to be fair, it doesn’t set out to be that. Smoking Causes Coughing can seem frivolous, even cynical, but it carries an explosive under its ironic surface. Blackly funny as its vignettes are, the film suggests that there’s something just as morbid in our voracious consumption of narratives that hinge on vengeance and wanton murder as there is in smoking.
Cigarettes in the film seem to symbolize the addictive pleasures with which we distract ourselves from existential threats posed by the relentless mass-production of those same pleasures. While the members of Tobacco Force distract themselves with stories, galactic supervillain and family man Lizardin (Benoît Poelvoorde) has decided to obliterate Earth for being insufficiently interesting. And as they contemplate their imminent doom, our heroes smoke the cancer sticks that they’re supposedly fighting against. The conundrum that Smoking Causes Coughing raises but leaves purposefully unresolved is whether stories in themselves, be they sincere or absurd, retain any power to divert or even give meaning to our collective fate.
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