You can't steer a real dick

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's top 50 films of 2023

#19 Incroyable Mais Vrai (Incredible But True)

Giddy comedy about middle-aged house hunters who find more in a bargain buy than anyone but director Quentin Dupieux could have dreamed of.

I have to say I'm surprised The Guardian chose a "giddy comedy" - it doesn't seem their style at all. So I'm intrigued...

Yet another French film and it's only 73 minutes long - which is a length we rarely see outside of TV shows. I should also warn you that the following contains minor spoilers, but they're clearly explained early on in the film (because you'd never guess the details if they weren't clearly explained to you). 

Alain (Alain Chabat) and Marie (Lea Drucker) are looking to buy a house and are shown one which seems perfectly ordinary, except for something the estate agent describes as "dazzling" - which turns out to be a hole in the ground in the basement.  Errr, OK. So, obviously, they agree to follow him down there - and this is where things get incredible but true. Although I'd have to say I'm not entirely sure how true they really are because after they enter the hole in the basement they emerge from a hole in the ceiling of the first floor. Twelve hours in the future. And three days younger. And so, obviously, they buy the house...

And Marie becomes somewhat obsessed with the tunnel whilst Alain is left to deal with life in the real world.  Not that his world is actually all that real because bizarrely, the tunnel isn't even the weirdest plot strand in the film - but I'm not going to tell you anything about that one because it's just very odd, but amusingly so.

It's a very silly film, but it does also makes you think - not least "well, what would I do with access to that tunnel?". After some thought, I some came to the conclusion "probably nothing", but I'd be more interested in a tunnel that took me back twelve hours in exchange for getting three days older (unfortunately the film never explains if you can go the other way). It's also pretty funny in places but quite upsetting in others - it's tonally very inconsistent which I assume was intentional but I found it very confusing. It also has a most odd passage towards the end whereby huge amounts of plot are fast forwarded through in a fifteen(?) minute section with no dialogue - often without really having any obvious reason for showing us the things it does. And then it leaves us with an ending which is more horror-like than anything we've seen up until this point - which really had me scratching my head.

Alain has the most do in this film and he does it well enough, often with an expression of mild bemusement (with good reason). Lea does a reasonable job when she's given one to do, but she does spend an awful lot of time climbing up and down ladders, which possibly isn't the best use of her skills. In terms of other actors, this is the second consecutive appearance of Benoit Magimel on this list who plays Gerard, Alain's boss - who imagined he'd be getting multiple mentions this year eh? He's actually pretty good in this as a most ridiculous man, but played very earnestly. And pretty much the only other people in the film given anything to do are Anaïs Demoustier as Jeanne, Gerard's girlfriend and Stéphane Pézerat as Franck the estate agent - but neither have loads to do. 

It was both written and directed by Quentin Dupieux and both aspects give the impression that he can do a decent job, but doesn't really have the patience to do an excellent job - there's some neat (bonkers, but neat) ideas in here but the "fast forward" section towards the end just gives the impression he'd got bored with the film and wanted to get it over with. 

So, all in all, I've no idea what I was supposed to make of this film or even what I did make of it, but I enjoyed it well enough and it was never boring and pleasingly brief. I'd struggle to fully recommend it as a film overall, but I think it's worth a watch for the imagination on display and the general bonkersness of it all. I don't really understand why The Guardian has it on its list (even their review is amusingly "this is a bit shit, but somehow I liked it"), but there have been far worse films on there - if you fancy it then it's available to stream on MUBI or to rent in considerably more places than you might expect.

#20 - WTF is this?