What If the Power Rangers Were French, Horny, and Caused Cancer?
For starters, they’re called the Tobacco Force, and these intergalactic “avengers” battle extraterrestrial monsters by giving them cancer via chemicals like nicotine, mercury and ammonia… but let’s assume that any similarities to other groups of helmeted, high-kicking heroes, living or dead, are not coincidental.
This quintet — technically a sextet if you count their suicidal robot, Norbert 500 — have just blown up an oversized, homicidal turtle in a quarry when a message comes through from their leader. His name is Chief Didier, and though he’s a grotty rat puppet with green goo oozing out of his mouth, that does not stop him from being quite the ladies’ vermin. (His pick-up line to one of the female Force members is: “Am I dreaming, or have your breasts grown larger?”) The boss is alerting his crew that an evil villain known as Lizardin is planning to attack Earth, and that they must prepare to defend the planet at all costs.
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But first, a little R&R. The group settles down by a lake and shacks up in an antiseptic white pod that contains beds, a kitchen, and a cupboard containing a fully stocked supermarket and check-out clerk. At night, they tell each other ghost stories by the campfire, ranging from the scary tale — “Well, more like scary-interesting,” admits Benzène (veteran French actor Gilles Lellouche), the Force’s figurehead — of a woman who finds a mysterious piece of headgear that, once worn, throws her into a philosophical funk. Another one involves an accident with a woodchipper; that one comes courtesy of a barracuda that Benzène has caught for dinner. Yet another one involves a fish-eye view of someone polluting a river. “That’s just depressing,” the group complains.
Meanwhile, Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier) frets about her crush on the Chief to her comrade Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra), and Méthanol (Vincent Lacoste) hits on the supermarket clerk, and everyone worries that Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi) simply “isn’t sincere enough” to kill cosmic creatures with toxic fumes. When they’re not bickering with each other and being jerky to fans and passerbys, the Force braces for an apocalypse to come now, or maybe later. They wait. And wait. And wait….
Smoking Causes Coughing may or may not be designed as a straight parody of Power Rangers-style adventures and the sugar highs of such kid-friendly sci-fi/superhero entertainment. It most definitely is the sort of high-concept goof that, taken to such go-for-broke extremes, blurs the line between giggle-inducing absurdity and absolutely brilliant ridiculousness. Lots of comedies can be described as Pythonesque, but this is one of the few that feels like you’re actually watching an old Monty Python’s Flying Circus episode dubbed in French. Vignettes bleed into each other or abruptly segue into something completely different, while every banal conversation between the Tobacco Force seems to devolve into anecdotes or offbeat tangents about sex, violence, bodily harm, literal buckets of blood, puking, and deadbeat parenting. Bonus points if you recognize that the supervillain threatening to destroy everything is Benoît Poelvoorde from Man Bites Dog, the 1992 Belgian movie that also trafficked in deadpan humor, dead bodies, and bad taste.
You may try pick out social commentary in that campfire tale about the fish and the polluter; Lizardin’s belief in “putting a sick planet out of its misery”; a social-media-obsessed character played by Blue Is the Warmest Color’s Adèle Exarchopoulos; or that the Superhero Entertainment Complex often deals with the same sort of sociopathic do-gooder behavior, just with a much straighter face. If you know the work of French director Quentin Dupieux — and if not, mon dieu, proceed immediately to 2010’s Rubber, still the greatest film about a serial-killing car tire ever made — then you’ve likely picked up on the fact that outrageousness and silliness are not the means but ends unto themselves. His work has been all over the place quality-wise, yet Smoking distills his punkish, puckish vibe down to one big pop-cultural goof. Whether something was, in fact, smoked during the making of it (we have our suspicions), is irrelevant. The sheer irreverence of everything here, starting with a Grand Guignol shower of guts and ending on one hell of an existential question mark, is more than enough to cause serious giggling fits.
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