Smoking Cause Coughing - 2023 Alliance Française French Film Fes

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https://www.affrenchfilmfestival.org/

Date Reviewed: 05/03/2023

Smoking Causes Coughing centres on Tobacco Force, a Power Rangers-looking superhero team with five members, each named after an evil ingredient in a cigarette (Nicotine, Methanol, Ammonia, etc).

They travel the world fighting evil and crime but are in desperate need of some time off.  So after an excessive opening battle Ninja Turtle style, the heroes go on a retreat where they try to get the better of each other by telling increasingly creepy stories.

In reality, the stories aren’t exactly creepy, they’re incredibly bizarre and grotesque. One is about a woman in a helmet. Another is told by a talking fish. A woodchipper comes into play. Each story unfolds in a bright, beautiful setting, making the laughs so much better.

Smoking Causes Coughing’s first segment is a delightful sendup of those 50s, 60s, and 70s kids’  television programs, with Tobacco Force dressed in costumes that are clearly a send-up of superhero costumes battling a giant tortoise, which is obviously just someone in a cheap rubber suit.

While the members of Tobacco Force distract themselves with stories, galactic supervillain, and family man Lizardin has decided to obliterate Earth for not being interesting enough to claim their concern.

Whether it’s the purposely threadbare puppet used for Chef Didier or the knowingly shoddy effects work for Tobacco Force’s powers, Director Quentin Dupieux lampoons these shows’ earnest campy kitsch. Dupieux’s films are admired, even loved, in France; puzzled over in the US; and as yet, largely unknown in the UK and Australia.

Tobacco Force is really funny in their own right, especially the fact that their leader Chef Didier only communicates by phone, a la Charlie’s Angels, and is a talking, oozing, puppet rat who all the women are madly in love with.

Cigarettes in the film seem to stand for the addictive means we have to distract ourselves from existential threats posed by the unrelenting mass production of those same pleasures.

But, as they contemplate their imminent doom, our heroes smoke the very cigarettes that they are supposedly crusading against.

From start to finish Smoking Causes Coughing is so erratic and hilarious that you can’t help but love it, and to say much more would take away from its wholly original and strangely addictive style!

Reviewed by Barry Hill OAM