One Fine Morning, directed by one of the best and maybe most underrated filmmakers working today, Mia Hansen-Løve, was one of my favorite films coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival last year, and it ultimately easily made my Top 15 Films of 2022. Hansen-Løve, as she has so often done so beautifully in all her films, masterfully and delicately explores relationships, familial and romantic, and the intersections and complications therein. In One Fine Morning, she focuses on two specific kinds of relationships: a father and a daughter, and that daughter and her lover. The daughter, played by the divine Lea Seydoux, is widowed with her own young daughter, and in one part of her life, she is figuring out how to be a caretaker for her brilliant father, a scholar and an intellect, who is nonetheless falling prey to dementia, and in another part of her life, she reconnects with an old friend and falls joyously and passionately in love.  Each aspect of her life is told with such nuance and richness that each could be a film on its own, but Hansen-Løve instead chooses to weave them together and ultimately does so in such a way that she offers us something much closer to what the complexities of real adult life is like -- being a daughter, being a lover, being a parent -- and the portrait that emerges is layered and satisfying. Hansen-Løve never offers easy answers or lessons for her characters, but I always emerge from her story-worlds feeling as if a vital nerve-center of our humanity has been gently but relentlessly exposed, and it’s a truly glorious kind of shock.

Smoking Causes Coughing might just be the polar opposite of One Fine Morning, a reminder that the various kinds of cinema that delight us are often wildly different from one another, and where Hansen-Løve revels in the nuances of a more realistic cinematic world, Quentin Dupieux romps around in all that is delightfully absurd, marvelously surreal, and magnificently ridiculous. Those of you who have enjoyed Dupieux’s earlier films, perhaps those like Rubber--which featured a sentient, homicidal car tire named Robert--will certainly enjoy Dupieux’s latest entry, but I would venture to say it’s perhaps his most accessible and his funniest. It features five very silly-looking superheroes called the Tobacco Force, who fight their enemies with the toxic ingredients of cigarettes, ingredients that shoot out of their fists when the team works together against such enemies as evil giant-sized tortoises. The fun really starts though when the team is sent off to a team-building retreat by their boss (who happens to be an oversized, talking puppet-rat), and the team challenges each other to tell the “scariest story.” The film then splits into several different stories, each more ridiculous than the next and hilariously portrayed in a deadpan manner. It’s a film for those who love a bit of silly and lightly cynical humor, reminiscent perhaps of Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and it is no surprise to me at all that the supremely entertaining king of “bad taste” John Waters called this “A superhero movie for idiots!” and “one of the best films of the year.”

But I must end this discussion of Smoking Causes Coughing with Quetin Dupieux’s own wonderfully wry note, which perfectly captures the tone of the film itself:

“When I began writing a comedy with such rich references to the past (POWER RANGERS, CREEPSHOW, SAN KU KAI, HALLOWEEN...) with the simple but noble intent of entertaining audiences depressed by current events, I never suspected that I would find so much substance and truth along the way... Disguised as a farcical parody, SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING is in fact my film that is most seriously connected with the real world. And I was the first to be surprised. Without any conscious desire on my part, our own times and its dramatic issues infiltrated my dialogues. As though it is no longer possible to ignore the crisis our planet is going through. As though it is now inconceivable that a film, no matter how funny, can avoid reflecting what all of humanity is going through. 

“Luckily for our audiences’ morale, SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING is an unabashed source of inconsequential entertainment. It never imposes any big speeches, and there is no moral of the story. Those who want to forget their troubles with a good laugh at the movies will probably see nothing but smoke. The cigarette smoke that we are talking about.”