Film: Rubber

Rubber (Dir: Quentin Dupieux, 2010, France, 85 min)

Screened at the 2010 Toronto After Dark Film Festival, Toronto, Canada.

So — you go with a goofy blurb and sometimes you're a-gonna get burned. The description "Killer Tire Horror" in the festival schedule was unusual enough for me to give it a go. Well... ugh.

In essence, there are two movies here. The first is that killer tire horror story, wherein one day a tire in a dump comes to life and rolls off, finding delight in squishing the things it can roll over. And when it comes to something too big to roll over, it has the telekinetic power to make it explode. Okay — there's some fun to be had here. There's some skill in humanizing a tire enough that it can express emotions — a jaunty roll here, a perplexed rocking motion there. And there's something pleasing in the Svankmajer-like images of the tire rolling through the desert. And it makes people's heads blow up! That's fun right there, for a while at least.

But the rest of the movie — the part involving humans interacting with each other — is execrably bad. First, there's a painful break-the-fourth-wall element, where the tire's adventures are watched by an audience, commenting on its progress. Then there's the meta-plot elements — This is really happening to us! No it's not! — of people doing random things and engaging in visual non-sequiturs. There are certain people who find whimsy-for-the-sake-of-whimsy uproariously funny — a guy behind me laughed throughout, including at such things as a woman pouring orange juice on her breakfast.

The film starts with a monologue about how things happen in movies for "no reason", and it's here that the movie suffers from a failure to think things through. It leads to a clash between two kinds of humour — with the sentient tire, taking a ludicrous situation and pushing through the scenario with an internal logic (call that the John Cleese school of humour); in the rest, it's just, "hey, this goofy shit's going on!" (call that the Napoleon Dynamite school of humour). Cross-cutting between the two styles undermines both. And I'll admit, that second kind of humour doesn't work for me at all, even when it's handled well.

The other problem is even the relatively worthy stuff was stretched out far too long. At eighty-five minutes, this movie was padded to the gills. If the chorus of observers and the No Reason shenanigans were cut, this could have been a clever ten- or fifteen-minute short. There's some visual flair here, but the narrative failure marks this as one to pass. Outside of specialist audiences of stoners and twelve-year-old boys, this is best avoided.¹

Preceded by: the twelve-minute Pleasure Dome (Dir: Alison S.M. Kobayashi), part of the series of all-Canadian shorts running before features at the fest. Speaking of toxic whimsy, this comes off like the work an experimental film-maker drunk on Wes Anderson, describing the eccentric inhabitants of the mysterious Pleasure Dome. Not a narrative piece — just a bunch of goofy stuff that stretches out past its welcome.

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¹ To be clear, based on audience reaction, this was a minority opinion at the screening I was at, so your mileage — ahem — may vary.