"Smoking Causes Coughing" -- Movie Review

 

As Lincoln Center’s French Film Festival winds down, I attended a screening of the comedy, “Smoking Causes Coughing”.

Synopsis

When an alien attempts a plan to destroy the planet, can a team of super-heroes prevent the apocalypse?

Story

The Tobacco Force – a collection of super-heroes assembled to stop smoking – is now facing a difficult foe:  a giant tortoise who’s able to fight them off one-by-one.  Unable to beat him individually they team-up against him to release various chemicals that will induce cancer.  It works!  The tortoise is blown to smithereens and a nearby family on vacation who witnessed the battle asks if this famous group will take a photo with them.  Tobacco Force is like rock stars with the common folks.  But despite their seeming success, it turns out that all is not well with this team, at least according to their boss, Didier – a rat-like being that constantly drools some kind of green goo whenever he speaks.

Didier conducts a video call with the team in their mini-van to discuss their overall performance.  It turns out that they have been behaving in a way that is too individualistic; they are lacking in cohesion as a unit.  As a result, Didier informs them that they will be taking some time off to go on a retreat – basically, this will serve as something of a team-building exercise that should help them learn how to better work together.  Off they travel deep into the woods near a lake where their trusty robot, Norbert, is soon replaced with an updated model that will better address their needs. 

Tobacco Force gets comfortably ensconced in an underground bunker that has been updated with not only personal space but also a fully-equipped kitchen that has a store for their various dietary needs and desires.  Enjoying all the comforts of home, the Force proceeds to re-acquaint themselves with each other instead of conducting the expected team-building exercises.  This takes the form of sitting around a campfire and telling a variety of scary stories – which quickly turns competitive as they each try to outspook each other.  Just then, Didier warns the team that an evil-doer from another planet has enacted a plan to destroy earth – but can Tobacco Force react in time to thwart the worst from happening?

Review

If you are a fan of absurdist comedies, then “Smoking Causes Coughing” should prove to be a deeply satisfying experience.  It sometimes seems that the entire movie is something of a non-sequitur.  “Smoking Causes Coughing” not only is a parody of the super-hero genre, it is also somewhat of a critique on society in terms of how smoking has become rather politicized and a cultural quagmire.  Yet the film seems to move away from that rather quickly as the focus of The Tobacco Force shifts rather abruptly from an anti-smoking squad to fighting causes of a much broader scope. 

Don’t look for “Smoking Causes Coughing” to make much sense because it’s not designed to do that; instead, it is merely reflects the nonsense in a world that is clearly based on the premise of nonsense – so in that regard, perhaps it makes perfect sense.  Sit back and prepare to be entertained by a delightfully wacky non-story, the point of which seems to be that the people who are in charge haven’t got a clue as to what they are doing and we shouldn’t depend on them to be able to help us.  Watching this, one might wonder if the filmmaker was high when he initially conceived of the story – it really does have that look and feel.

As goofy as “Smoking Causes Coughing” may be, its trip into weirdness is miraculously tied together by all of the stories that are told throughout the movie.  It would not be unreasonable to expect that such detours would slow down the film or take you away from the main plot; it does not slow it down at all, in fact it just expands on the absurd premise.  Also, as far as being distracted from the main plot … well, really there isn’t one.  Or at least there isn’t one that is essential to the greater point of the motion picture.  It is truly rare that you see a French movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but this one truly hits the spot.