Mandibules [Mandibles] (Quentin Dupieux, 2020)

[Never Cursed]

1 year after Deerskin premiered at Cannes, Quentin Dupieux will debut his next film, Mandibles, starring Adèle Exarchopoulos, at this year's Cannes.

This ended up debuting at Venice, and is about two drifters who stumble across a giant fly. Exarchopoulos plays a brain-damaged woman who shouts all of her lines. Trailer here

[domino harvey]

Exarchopoulos is cracking me up in that trailer, they can lose the fly stuff

[Never Cursed]

That's about how I felt too - maybe the fly is used in the same springboard way as the basic conceit of the jacket in Deerskin

[domino harvey]

While trying to figure out where I'd seen one of the leads, I learned both were stars of a French sketch comedy duo PalmAshow, l'emission. This could also use Adèle Exarchopoulos yelling to make it funny

[therewillbeblus]

That's about how I felt too - maybe the fly is used in the same springboard way as the basic conceit of the jacket in Deerskin

Yep, people are more absurd than giant flies. Sign me up.

[soundchaser]

Is Anaïs Demoustier still in this? Seems odd that she wouldn’t be billed high enough to show up in the trailer. (Seems fun regardless, but I was looking forward to seeing her again.)

[Aunt Peg]

Just saw this today. Sadly there were only about half a dozen people in the cinema.

My partner and I both loved it and thought is was Quentin Dupieux's best film to date. A friend who was at the screening HATED it.

Adèle Exarchopoulos stole the film from the two talented male leads and the fly was every effective.

[therewillbeblus]

There is no way this is a better film than Deerskin, but I probably laughed harder at a handful of gags (often improvisational gestures, the actors really deserve most of the credit here) than any other Depieux work. The film takes a while to find its footing - though it's most certainly uneven by design, emulating the 'flight of ideas' mentality (or lackthereof) of its protagonists - but its torpid energy maintains a pleasant charm until we reach the midpoint and the laughs come flying. Adèle Exarchopoulos is hilarious, but David Marsais and Grégoire Ludig carry the film as a modern Dumb and Dumber duo, with the final punchline potentially questioning this obvious stamp. The difference between this film and the rest of Depieux's oeuvre is that his other films contain an absurd internal logic that occupies the air of their atmospheres that most characters breathe (including Deerskin which uses this unveiling of peculiarities to its advantage, by slowly provoking us to question if this guy is alone in his solipsistic attitude, only to bring out the crazy from the peripheries to reveal that the man who wants to be special isn't even able to hold that grandiose quality of lunacy in solitude!) while Mandibules doesn’t need an internal logic, because the central duo are so mindless that they accept any absurd unpredictable variable and run with it immediately, passively reflecting naïveté (or rather anti-worldliness) as the essence of their characters. And because we all know someone who bears such a posture, this element of the movie succeeds in spades against the backdrop of a 'normal' environment (relatively speaking). Toro!

[domino harvey]

Exarchopoulos is cracking me up in that trailer, they can lose the fly stuff

This worked for like twenty seconds in the trailer, but like everything else in this film, in practice it’s just so exhaustively unfunny— and she’s still the best part! I just don’t find aimless stupidity amusing, no matter how genial, and all of the fly stuff is equal parts gross and completely unnecessarily high concept— the film only exists because of the fly stuff, but nothing that happens is really dependent on it over, say, a dog (which the film lampshades, but so what?) or some other non fantastical element. On the plus side, the film was mercifully short, but still felt padded by like a factor of three!