The Consumption

For the 10 days leading up to CIFF’s opening gala, I’ll be posting a quick write-up per day on some of my favourite movies at the fest. I’m not exactly unbiased — CIFF does give me a paycheque, after all — but these posts are my own opinions and not those of the festival.

Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber was more than a little divisive, focusing as it did on a homicidal car tire and digressing into metatextual whoosits that some folks I know wrote off as pure pretentiousness. I loved it, though. Maybe that view is coloured a bit by the CUFF screening, which featured a pun-laden Q&A with the film’s leading inanimate object, but I thought it hit just the right balance between entertaining and odd.

Dupieux’s new film doesn’t have quite the same easy hook — “killer car tire” is one of those premises where you immediately know whether or not you want to watch it. Wrong is about a guy whose dog goes missing. That’s pretty much it as far as the central conflict. There are other strange goings on, but the less you know about them, the better. What you need to know is that William Fichtner is terrific in it, and that there are more than enough weird little moments to leave you giggling. It’s like a sillier Charlie Kaufman film, and while I’m still not entirely convinced that it adds up to anything meaningful, I don’t think that matters — Dupieux clearly has some strong Dadaist tendencies, and Dadaism is supposed to be meaningless. At the very least, it’s all kinds of entertaining.