Film Review
By far the weirdest French film of the last decade,
Rubber takes us on a bizarre
journey into the realm of the absurd and is both breathtakingly
original and grotesquely sick. If Stephen King and George
A. Romero had been minded to attempt a remake of Albert Lamorisse's
Le
Ballon rouge, this is what it would probably have ended up
looking like - a blood-splattered fantasy in which a psychopathic car tyre
(named Robert, presumably after the author of
Psycho) terrorises a small Californian town (before falling in
love). At first,
Rubber
feels like the worst B-movie ever-made, and yet whilst it revels in its
cheapness and absurdity, it soon becomes strangely compelling. For the
first forty minutes at least, it is hard not to be caught up in the
film's indefinable eccentric magic. It is fair to say that
Rubber is a film that is in a class
of its own, a true cinematic one-off.
Rubber is the second feature
to be directed by Quentin Dupieux, who is better known by his pseudonym
Mr Oizo, under which name he has pursued a very successful career as an
electro-house musician (closely associated with a popular brand of
jeans). Dupieux's previous film
Steak (2007), a comedy featuring
the popular double act Eric and Ramzy, was both a major box office flop
and a critical failure in France.
Rubber has more in common with
Dupieux's first film, a wacky short titled
Nonfilm (2002), which shares the
meta-film and zany, abstract qualities of his latest off-the-wall
production. What
Nonfilm
and
Rubber have in common is
an attempt to explore what cinema is and how we relate to it,
flagrantly breaching moviemaking conventions whilst seemingly embracing
familiar genres.
Rubber
is a cinematic
pot pourri
that brings together elements of road movie, slasher movie, spaghetti
western, black comedy and sci-fi horror film, but what it really is is
a statement of the absurdity of cinema.
Whilst
Rubber is certainly a
provocative and innovative excursion into the wide-blue yonder of the
imagination, it is not the easiest of films to sit through. The
greatest challenge it presents is not its gratuitous gore content - the
gruesome head explosions, which clearly owe something to David
Cronenberg's
Scanners (1981)
- but its lack of a coherent narrative and characters we can identify
with. Dupieux is right in assuming that a film need not be
logical to be appreciated, but the film should at least have some
structure to it.
Rubber's brilliant premise is
pretty well exhausted by its midpoint, after which the film fails to
develop any further and merely fills out the remaining runtime with
more of the same, more gory spectacle interspersed with anarchic
whimsy. At this point, if you'll forgive the pun, the film
becomes a little tiresome.
Rubber looks suspiciously as
if it was conceived as a short film and stretched (not too difficult, given
its title) to a full-length feature. This shows not only in the
uneven pacing and paucity of new content in the film's second half, but
also its over-reliance on meta-film gimmicks. The framing
device that the film employs (the tyre's antics are witnessed
from a distance by a crowd of spectators) is crude and weakens
the film's integrity. Do we need
the main (human) character to face the camera and tell us that the film
is without any purpose? Couldn't we have worked that out for
ourselves?
Rubber
certainly has great novelty value and probably has what it takes to
become a cult classic, but it is a little too self-indulgent and
self-conscious to be much more than a quirky cinematic
aberration.
© James Travers 2011
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