Keep An Eye Out (2018)

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Director: Quentin Dupieux

Screenplay: Quentin Dupieux

Cast: Benoît Poelvoorde as Commissaire Buron; Grégoire Ludig as Fugain; Marc Fraize as Philippe; Anaïs Demoustier as Fiona; Orelsan as Sylvain; Philippe Duquesne as Champonin; Jacky Lambert as Franchet / Carine Lustain; Jeanne Rosa as Narta; Vincent Grass as Daniel

Synopsis: In a police station being questioned for a suspicious death by Commissaire Buron (Benoît Poelvoorde), main suspect Fugain (Grégoire Ludig) is in an even worst predicament when another gristly incident happens and figures start to invade his ongoing testimony to Buron.

[Some Major Spoilers, so be wary]

It's been a long while since I've seen a Quentin Dupieux film, since his debut (and influence on the blog) Rubber (2010), and it's been too long. Unfortunately whilst his work was still being released in the USA, it stopped in the UK leaving many films like Wrong (2012) and Reality (2014) out of reach. It's a shame as, since a film about a sentient rubber tire with psychic powers, Dupieux here plays a subtler game indebted to the final period of Luis Buñuel's career with the films he shot in France.

Initially it suggests a farce as a half naked man conducts an orchestra in the park, quite well in fact as he could've taken the job if he merely wore trousers, before the police chase him off. Afterwards it becomes a tale of Fugain, who finds himself being questioned by Commissaire Buron for an inexplicable body being found outside his apartment complex. Recounting his side through an ongoing testimony, Fugain has a further issue at hand that there's now a dead cop (by accident via a triangle protractor and an open filing cabinet drawer) being hidden in the room, deciding not to try to admit to an accident but hiding him in a cupboard.  

Keep An Eye Out is a small tale, one which is entirely about this incident whilst Dupieux punctures it with moments of strangeness. Buron has a hole in his chest, for example, from being shot which is brought up when he smokes, or when an oyster (plus shell) is eaten. All is played for deadpan humour thankfully, the absurdity found in it breaking the normalcy set up; it's particularly a good choice in lieu of the film being shot and designed as having a husky, deep coloured aesthetic with minimal camera movements, feeling like it is set in the seventies at points but clearly in its own world. Even when the cast is broad - a one eyed officer very enthusiastic about his police badge, Buron being the lacksidasical cop who takes a call for a casual meeting in the midst of an interrogation - there is still the sense of its own form of naturalism in contrast to Rubber which deliberately, in a meta text, played with the notion of "just because" with cinema's absurdities.

The thing that stands out here in contrast to that film, rather than openly riffing on its own artificiality, is that, even if it does raise questions about the logic of the film itself, Dupieux decided to have a film where the reality is constantly being manipulated without it being a deliberate meta text. Instead, Fugain's testimony of the night he found the body becomes the prime aspect of the narrative - starting with telling all the amount of times he went out his door one night, all watched over by a nosey female neighbour, alongside details such as the improvised cockroach spray he uses malfunction, all of which Buron immediately finds boring and openly says to him.

Then figures invade the testimony (including the dead officer Fugain is trying to hide) demanding questions and setting him off tangents in time, including a stint not part of the testimony talking to the officer's wife about how he'll meet him in the future outside the testimony, and even Buron himself becomes a bystander within it who can see everything visually. This is why I made the Buñuel reference. The film does have an overt moment of farce with this structure - the pair sharing false memories they can actually see, Buron stuck on an desert island starving, Fugain having a childhood memory of letting the dog free and sticking the dog collar (plus chain) on and sitting in the dog house outside - but the flashbacks in general become closer to Buñuel's work. Films in his final French era of cinema, famously The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), played with dreams and reality being constantly subjective to each other in layered plot structures; even before Fugain is forced on tangents talking to intruders, the entire fact that Buron is prodding these testimony scenes as not being particularly exciting have their own gleeful sense of the perverse to them in unfolding the reality itself.

From here, it's literally a chamber piece, apt as whilst it does have moments which might have some logic gaps, it does play into where the film leads to when its pulls the carpet from under the viewer's feet and the world is a literal stage. It's an obvious twist if you were open minded, but the joke is that Fugain is still stuck in a scenario which now becomes Kafkaesque when it ends. And ultimately Keep An Eye Out feels like, as a compliment, a small project for Dupieux, a sketch in filmic form going from his ambitious mad debut, the sketches' in a filmmaker's career capable of still being worthy and here in particular showing his flexibility. In fact, the earnestness of the cast and the film's style even enforces a greater weirdness, their good solid performances adding emphasis to the moments of true bizarreness whilst the production and technical craft, subdued, creates a level of its own rules of reality to work from. Just so that, when that aforementioned oyster is eaten whole, it feels of the world even down to a look of sheepishness when a trickle of blood is on the eater's lip, admitting whilst it was a nice oyster it cut their mouth as if a minor inconvenience.

Abstract Rating: Absurd/Playful/Weird

Abstract Spectrum (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Personal Opinion:

It was nice to see Quentin Dupieux again; excessively long since the first encounter and arguably he's matured in that time to an advantage whilst still being incredibly silly, which is also a good thing. The result is a nice, efficiently made gem which makes one wish Dupieux was actually better known so I can see his films.

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