The French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux, director of the midnight cult film “Rubber” (a few homicidal automotive tire) and the ticklishly perverse “Deerskin” (through which Jean Dujardin performed a lonely loon obsessive about a classic fringed suede jacket), is a dada prankster whose work evokes a unique sense of anticipation from that of virtually every other filmmaker. While you go right into a Quentin Dupieux movie, it’s with the thought, “WTF is he going to pull this time?” His motion pictures are goofs, larks, stunts, knowingly arch bizarro-world riffs And I used to be particularly interested in “Full Phil,” as a result of it combines Dupieux’s French surrealist impishness with the American star energy of Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson. Would this be Dupieux’s crossover film? If that’s the case, WTF would he pull this time?
It wouldn’t take a lot for “Full Phil” to be his crossover film, for the reason that viewers for Dupieux (at the least within the U.S.) has lengthy been miniscule-to-nonexistent. “Full Phil,” in its full-tilt Dupieux manner, is an eminently watchable film, a theater-of-the-absurd duel of wits between a father and daughter who’re on trip collectively in Paris (they’ve gone there to fix fences, although the very fact is that they’re at swords’ factors). The movie, which Dupieux wrote, shot, edited, and directed, isn’t pretty much as good as “Rubber” or “Deerskin.” It’s middle-drawer mishegas — although a part of what’s kind of enjoyable about it, and likewise slightly attention-grabbing (even when it will get overdone), is that the director, on this case, really comes on like he has one thing to say.
Nearly the whole film unfolds inside a beige Paris resort suite, after which a flowery restaurant, the place Philip Doom (Harrelson), who is a few kind of rich blowhard, and his 32-year-old daughter, Madeleine (Stewart), are sitting round berating one another. It’s made clear that the chief antagonist is Philip, who begins off by griping that Madeleine isn’t confining herself to her half of the suite. That’s such a petty grievance that she appears completely justified in being aggravated by it. However what we additionally register is that getting pissed off at Philip is Madeleine’s important perspective towards her father.
Is it one thing he did? From the beginning, Dupieux makes use of the characters allegorically. They’ve the connection they’ve (and sure, the film will colour that in), however Phil, the ebulliently grumpy 60ish dad, along with his grinning and shouting and wish for management, is a stand-in for a sure technology of domineering male, whereas Madeleine, whose impatience together with her father is off the hook, is a stand-in for a sure technology of ladies whose response towards that type of management is as pitiless as a metal blade. She gained’t give an inch (and he gained’t both).
In at the least a method, Philip appears a bit nuts: The bathroom in his half of the suite is stuffed up (Madeleine’s fault!), however he refuses to name resort upkeep to have them unclog it, as a result of he thinks that’s embarrassing. Woody Harrelson declaims each line, upping the relentless issue of Phil’s mania. However he additionally enables you to see Phil’s trustworthy need to win again his daughter’s love. For some time, the 2 characters go at one another with a yin-and-yang of poisonous intolerance. And when Lucie (Charlotte Le Bon), a resort employee, drops by the suite, observes what’s occurring, and insists on staying as a result of she finds Philip’s habits too “aggressive,” the movie’s allegory is full. Lucie is the “woke” scold, representing the pressure that at all times makes Philip really feel like he’s being watched and condemned, which solely triggers his asshole perspective all of the extra.
But Dupieux doesn’t stage any of this in a didactic or judgmental manner. As an alternative, he desires to show a number of the currents of middle-class life right into a spectacle of chortling farce, the best way Buñuel did. However that’s a little bit of a lofty comparability, since “Full Phil” is generally the two-hander as broad comedian hate-fest.
If the tone of those scenes qualifies as borderline actual, I ought to add that there’s an completely unhinged framing machine, one the movie retains reducing again to. In a intentionally cheap-looking black-and-white faux-’50s horror film, the comedy workforce of Tim & Eric (Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim) play nerdish mad scientists who seize and convey to their laboratory a dino-fish monster who seems to be like a chomping-jawed gill-man made from papier-mâché. He tears off his victims’ noggins and devours these heads entire. The 2 scientists kill him and convey him again to life à la “Frankenstein.” What that all means allegorically is…beats the fuck out of me.
Stewart, testy however cheap, performs Madeleine as a straight-shooter, and he or she’s clearly having enjoyable lobbing acid insults Harrelson’s manner. There’s, nevertheless, one eccentric factor about Madeleine: All through the film, she by no means stops consuming (a quiche, a hen leg, a steak, road sizzling canine, sauces she dips her fingers into), and since Stewart actually is chowing down, a part of the joke is that you just surprise how they filmed all this. (They need to not have accomplished too many takes.) The opposite half of the joke is: The extra Madeleine eats, the extra her father’s stomach expands. By the point they go to a restaurant, which regardless of its elegant trappings retains serving you meals (that is beginning to be very midnight-movie Buñuel), Philip’s abdomen pops out of his shirt, and you’ll sort of inform the place that’s all going.
Philip, channeling Madeline’s urge for food, actually does change into “full Phil,” and that’s a completely wacked thought; it wouldn’t be a Quentin Dupieux movie in any other case. Cinema of the absurd isn’t essentially meant to be “understood.” However “Full Phil,” brash and throttling as it’s, is an italicized screw-loose satire that some will wish to see, as a result of in its midway humorous, midway off-putting excessive manner it dares to paint up to now exterior the strains.
