‘Smoking Causes Coughing’ Review: Quentin Dupieux’s Very Silly, Very Spacy Superhero Trifle
variety.comGuy Lodge Film CriticFor a film featuring bloody interspecies warfare, rampant murder and mutilation, a pessimistic treatise on environmental pollution and (maybe) the end of the world — all crammed into just 77 minutes — “Smoking Causes Coughing” feels both rather jaunty and entirely inconsequential.
That would be surprising if it came from anyone but Quentin Dupieux, the current absurdist-in-chief of French auteur cinema: Everything in his latest that feels, in and of itself, out of left field also happens to be comfortably in his lane.
Following a group of spandex-clad, cigarette-toting superheroes on a rural retreat, intended to recharge their powers, that goes shaggily awry, this is a minor escapade even for Dupieux, its already slack structure eventually devolving into disconnected sketches.
It’s a film of fragmentary but funny rewards — funnier still, most likely, if accompanied by smoking of a different kind. Aptly unveiled in the Midnight program at Cannes this year — Dupieux’s first outing in the festival’s official selection — “Smoking Causes Coughing” plays ideally as a brief, bright palate cleanser in festival conditions, a welcome respite from heftier and more challenging fare.
Read more on variety.com
