Mayflies: "Mandibles"

Fans of Quentin Dupieux's comic doodles have been spoilt this year. The summer reopening brought the delayed release of the marvellous Deerskin; hot on its heels, we have Dupieux's latest Mandibles, a stoner comedy that presents as a prefabricated joke. Heard the one about the dudes who found a giant fly in the back of their car? Dupieux takes this set-up and runs around the houses with it. Mandibles starts in the realms of the crime movie, with itinerant Manu (Grégoire Ludig, who resembles one of Dan Skinner's longer-maned creations, or Bradley Cooper if he'd started living out of a camper van) and old pal Jean-Gab (David Marsaire, a bumfluffy Rob Schneider) instructed to make a briefcase swap around the backstreets of a depopulated coastal resort. A pitstop taken to investigate the loud fluttering sound coming from the boot of their stolen Merc waylays them, however - for there it is: a CG-animatronic hybrid the size of a multi-limbed E.T. Several elements prove funny here. Foremost among them is that the fly - Dominique, our heroes name it, or "Do-Do" - isn't at all movie-cute, rather mankily nondescript, a scuttling turd with basketballs for eyes that you wouldn't think twice about swatting. (With the full weight of a Sunday broadsheet, in this instance.) Furthermore: rather than reacting to it as the freak of nature it is, Manu and Jean-Gab respond with casual indifference. Their eyes remain firmly on the pitiful sum of money being held out to them as low-level criminal muscle; if these manchildren weren't so likable on some level, you'd swear Dupieux was writing a fable premised on the fly's eternal, eternally incomprehensible attraction to shit.

Instead, Mandibles establishes an oddly touching parallel between its mayfly characters and its insect-in-chief that suggests Dupieux was among those many millions of Frenchies who turned out en masse for 1995's Microcosmos. The first time we see Manu, he's cocooned in a sleeping bag on a beach, the tide lapping gently at his feet; both the fly and its keepers wind up eating mincemeat from cans; and our protagonists are soon observed zigzagging around without apparent rhyme or reason. The briefcase swap gets funnier the longer it isn't made; during the narrative's three-day lifecycle, Manu and Jean-Gab forcibly occupy a trailer, contrive to burn it down, find renewed sanctuary in the holiday home of a young woman who mistakes Manu for an old schoolfriend, and then have their cover blown by Adèle Exarchopoulos's Agnès, who has "a vocal problem" that means she shouts a lot. The latter is supposed to be brain-damaged in some way, and you may well need a moment to consider whether Dupieux is indulging in that familiarly French, PC-baiting approach to mental illness - the kind of unmuzzled razzing that helped the recent Bye Bye Morons stage its unlikely heist on this year's Cesars ceremony. Yet there's equally a measure of relief at seeing someone cast Exarchopoulos as something other than a Lolita-like sexbomb, and she has a priceless moment as one of her housemates accuses her of being unbearable. ("ME?," she bellows, at roughly 200 decibels. "UNBEARABLE?")

Deerskin would be the better entrypoint into this filmography, I think: even at his murderous worst, Jean Dujardin remains a more reassuring presence than the new film's ramshackle oddballs, and you just have to go along with some of Mandibles' in-baked randomness. (Its punchline - "Franchement, Jean-Gab, c'est une mouche" - is a good one, but not Deerskin good.) What's become increasingly apparent, however, is that Dupieux is one of the few directors of contemporary screen comedy who still thinks in terms of images; his time in the image-obsessed pop space (as Mr. Oizo) has served him well. Leaving behind Deerskin's beigey, cloistered world, Dupieux here arrives at an off-season hotspot where the absence of sunseekers only adds to the air of absurdity, and the remaining sunshine brings out the pleasing pastels in his protagonists' wardrobe. There's an end-of-summer mellowness at play that informs the laissez-faire characterisation and keeps the film on just the right side of arbitrary; it's relaxed, so we relax, too. Like Manu, eating stew and shrugging as he watches that trailer burn to the ground, I went along with most of it: Jean-Gab's efforts to train Do-Do up into a potential circus act, Ludig's secondary role as the schoolfriend for which Manu is mistaken, the size of the briefcase as we finally circle back to that once-pressing drop-off, proportionate as it is to the importance Dupieux affords it within this universe. I wouldn't go expecting big laughs from a film that's so clearly preoccupied with small things, but the underlying assertion we're all just specks on a windscreen is quietly profound - and perversely funny, too, non?

Mandibles is now playing in selected cinemas, and available to rent via altitude.film.