Rubber By Quentin Dupieux

In a rather sedate 2010 Cannes edition, no wonder Quentin Dupieux’s new onscreen craziness attracted everyone’s attention in the Critics’ Week. The French director (alias electro musician Mr Oizo) is a proponent of the film-within-a-film and other screenplay disturbances - testified by the plastic surgery of Eric and Ramzy in Steak and the gigantic making-of Nonfilm. His latest head trip is Rubber, in which a serial-killer tyre suddenly comes alive and wanders across the Californian desert, filled with a violent hatred against all living things. The first few minutes clearly set in motion the nonsense of things to come - those who are allergic to offbeat movies can already get out of the cinema.

In an almost political way, the director wants to unseat his audience. The exercise is quite twisted, but we can only admire such freedom and boldness. A hilariously absurd mockery of mainstream entertainment, especially Hollywood, Rubber deforms the classic shapes of American cinema with an overflowing madness, making for instance Roxane Mesquida (also seen in Gregg Araki’s Kaboom as a lesbian witch) the princess of a lonely boot. Even if its limitations are clear, such experimentation can only be applauded.

By Geoffrey Crété