If a viewer can expect anything from a Quentin Dupieux film titled Reality, it’s willful surrealism. Reality and reality pass each other like two ships in the night, and one of those ships is an impish gallimaufry stitched together from bits and pieces of Magnolia, Holy Motors, Inception, Hitoshi Matsumoto’s oeuvre, and the vast canon of grade-Z horror cinema. The only coherent element of Reality is its incoherence. Dupieux refuses to make his point clear. That’s okay, though. Remember, this is the man who directed Rubber, an equally defiant genre joint about a killer car tire with telekinetic powers. Like Rubber, Reality has something to say about the process of making movies. Unlike Rubber, it’s actually interesting.
Pour one out for the hapless publicist who has to write a synopsis for this flick; writing out a quick and easy plot summary that encapsulates Reality’s rampant trippiness is nothing short of nightmarish. Coincidentally, nightmares are the ticking gears at the heart of Reality’s plot (though suggesting that the film even has a plot feels reckless and irresponsible). The basic gist is this: Jason (Alain Chabat) is a camera operator working on a supremely depressing cooking show hosted by Denis (Jon Heder), who claims to be afflicted by a nefarious rash that nobody but him can see. Meanwhile, young Reality (Kyla Kennedy) is itching to discover the contents of a blue VHS tape her dad obliviously spills from the guts of a wild boar he successfully bagged in the wild. Unbeknownst to Reality, her entire life is the subject from afar of a film being shot by eccentric genius director Zog (John Glover), and her crossdressing superintendent, Henri (Eric Wareheim), is in therapy with Jason’s wife, Alice (Élodie Bouchez). Jason wants to make a schlock picture where sentient TV sets kill people. Reality wants to find out what’s on that bloody tape. Denis wants his itching to stop. And god only knows what Henri wants, but thankfully he’s sort of unimportant.
So that’s Reality in a nutshell, sort of; the truth is that Reality doesn’t fit into any nutshell, much less our preconceived notions of what it’s supposed to be or how it might play out. Certain elements are predictable. Guessing what mysteries that cerulean tape might contain is child’s play, for one, and clever viewers might see the fate of Jason’s germinating trashterpiece coming from a mile away. (If it’s any consolation to poor Jason, Waves looks like an absolutely fantastic midnight movie, even if it’s more or less a play on the abominable Rubber.) But whereas the knowing winks and inside baseball jokes of Rubber grew irritating within its first 10 minutes, Dupieux’s nudging in Reality is endearing. Reality might habitually undermine its chances at comprehensibility, but damned if watching it isn’t just heaps of fun.
Part of that is Dupieux himself. The Parisian-born DJ has made other films in between now and the release of Rubber (Wrong Cops and Wrong, neither of which directly relates to the other), but it’s plain to see that he’s loosened up in his half-decade of filmmaking. Everything about Reality is intentional, but Dupieux has allowed himself to let go of his film-school pretensions. Instead of making a movie about making movies, he’s just making a goddamn movie that is only coincidentally about making movies. But in telling the story of hapless Jason, Dupieux gives the impression that he’s working through personal fears of his own. Reality is not a horror film, but a dream sequence in which Jason is awarded an Oscar for Best Groan in Movie History (don’t ask, just watch) is patently horrifying. He’s stuck in a chair, surrounded by a faceless audience and paralyzed by the deafening sound of silent applause. (The scene features cameos by Rubber’s Roxane Mesquida and The Artist’s Michel Hazanavicius as presenters.) Who wouldn’t find that terrifying?
The rest of what makes Reality such a ball is its cast. As the film’s only true constant, Chabat is a delight, an unwitting man who inches closer and closer to the edge as incidents and oddities pile up more and more. Glover, too, is a creepy hoot, arguably the real puppetmaster pulling the strings on Reality’s mind-screwing theatricality. (Wareheim, for his part, struggles to walk through a parking lot convincingly, but his brand of non-acting is suited to the material.) The key is that they’re all well aware of what the audience has to find out through experience: there’s no sense to be made here, at least none that Dupieux has woven into the narrative himself. The further the movie takes its premise, the more you’re going to want from it, but your best recourse is to sit back, relax, and let Reality wash your brain.
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