The films of Quentin Dupieux would’ve been a smash in the late ’60s and early ’70s, crammed as they are with surreal tricks and car tires that kill people and questions about how much of what we see is real, man. After the zany shenanigans of Rubber and Wrong, Dupieux takes on the moviemaking business in Realite, although this movie is about other things too. And possibly about nothing.
A little girl is puzzled by a VHS tape she sees tumbling out of a boar’s belly when her sportsman father cleans the dead animal. But this vignette turns out to be part of a movie being shot by a pretentious director (John Glover), whose French producer (Jonathan Lambert) is growing impatient with the film’s realistic style. The producer also green-lights an idiotic-sounding horror movie pitched by cameraman Jason Tantra (Alain Chabat), but on one condition: Tantra must record the ideal groan for the dying characters in his movie. When Tantra and his wife (Elodie Bouchez) attend a movie, he is shocked to discover that someone else has stolen his exact concept—the ultimate artist’s nightmare. But is it literally a nightmare? Dupieux regularly shows us that some incidents in the film are the characters’ dreams, a conceit that grows alarming when the people we thought existed in a fictional reality start to interact with the movie characters. Or possibly vice versa.
This leaves out a talk-show host (Napoleon Dynamite star Jon Heder) diagnosed with “eczema on the inside,” and a school principal (comedian Eric Wareheim) who dreams of dressing in women’s clothes. All of which would wear out its welcome after, oh, 40 minutes or so if Dupieux hadn’t commited so fully to his brand of reality-bending. There’s no guessing game here, no encouraging the audience to figure out who the ultimate dreamer might be. The result is a movie that isn’t really funny, although you will laugh a few times. It’s more eerie than funny, like looking into a distorted mirror and realizing there might be some truth there. Tantra’s movie idea is about TV sets that hypnotize and then finally kill the world’s population. Realite is presumably offered as a tonic to this scenario—and yet it’s still dangerous.
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REALITE Runs Fri., May 22–Thurs., May 28 at Grand Illusion. Not rated. 95 minutes.
