L'Accident de piano

Adèle Exarchopoulos
           

Quentin Dupieux's L'Accident de piano is a typical pratfall filled misanthropic farce from the eccentric Gallic talent. Adèle Exarchopoulos stars as Magalie who we eventually learn is a social media star whose online sobriquet is Megajugs. The first act consists of an injured Magalie, assisted by her PA Patrick (an excellent Jérôme Commandeur), settling into a chalet near the Alps. Dupieux has endeavored to make Ms. Exarchopoulos as unattractive as possible, a Herculean undertaking, and succeeds with padding, a frugly wig, and braces. Apparently a stunt involving a piano has gone awry, but this first section of the film is intentionally obscure and off-putting. We do learn that Megajugs is a narcissistic diva who enjoys bullying the apparently long suffering Patrick. Their solitude is broken by some hooligan fans and a phone call by a blackmailer who knows the details about the piano accident.

Simone, the blackmailer played by a tightly wound (like her braids) Sandrine Kiberlain, is a reporter who seeks not cash, but the legal tender of the age: an interview. Megajugs accedes to this and the resulting confrontation takes up most of the middle section of the film. Simone probes Megajugs' background and, through flashbacks, we view her path to fame. A viewing of an episode of Jackass inspires the 14 year old Megajugs to become the distaff Johnny Knoxville, a goal she embraces whole heartedly thanks to a "congenital insensitivity to pain." Megajugs posts videos of her masochistic exploits in which she always assumes the Wile E. Coyote role. Sandrine assumes the voice of reason in the interview. She wants to know why. Something, in the tradition of French dualism, that Megajugs is loath to do. She represents the credo of the unconscious artist reacting against interpretation. Megajugs and by extension Dupieux feels that it is pointless to analyze her nihilistic behavior.

I feel that, even though the character of Megajugs is artistically aligned with the juvenile provocateur Dupieux, that the film, which ends with Megajugs indulging in a quiet frenzy of Dionysian destruction, is ultimately an auto-critique on the limits of nihilism. Megajugs is still her 14 year old self, an aging adolescent who is hopelessly self absorbed. L'Accident de piano also stands as a visual meditation on the psychic link between comedy and violence. The flick reminds me of the old Mel Brooks joke: "Tragedy is me getting a paper cut. Comedy is you falling into a hole and breaking your leg." I'm surprised Dupieux didn't utilize a falling anvil. Regardless, Ms. Exarchopoulos makes a magnificent monster. 

El Jockey

Ursula Corbero and Nahuel Perez Biscayart          

Luis Ortega's El Jockey, released in the US as Kill the Jockey, is amiable light entertainment. Ortega is only 45, but the Argentinian writer and director has built up an impressive filmography over the last two decades. El Jockey wears its influences lightly: dashes of color and queer sensibility (Almodovar), deadpan surrealism (Kaurismäki), and comic zaniness (Jerry Lewis). Nahuel Pérez Biscayart is the lead, a hapless jockey named Remo who is under the thumb of a small time crime boss. He has a pregnant girlfriend, a fellow jockey named Abril (Úrsula Corberó), a tip of the gaucho to Victoria I suppose. Remo has a bad crash at the track and ends up at the hospital suffering from some whacky form of amnesia. He escapes the hospital, for no apparent reason, wearing a stolen mink coat and little else. While he wanders amongst the homeless and dispossessed of Buenos Aires, Abril finds consolation in the arms of another jockey, the sassy Ana (Mariana di Girolamo).

The dramatic contrivances that take up the last act are paper thin, but Ortega's visual imagination never flags. El Jockey boasts 2025's best sight gags. The colors in this flick really pop thanks to Ortega and cinematographer Timo Salminen, a longtime collaborator of Aki Kaurismäki. Both leads are superb, Biscayart does a great deadpan and Corberó smolders impressively. The dance numbers are a hoot and are a great showcase for the players. The music is outstanding, both the Argentine pop songs, old and new, and the score by Sune Wagner, of the Danish band The Raveonettes. El Jockey is not the type of movie that will change the course of film history, but it provides more entertainment than some of those that do. Currently streaming on MUBI.

Dracula

Radu Jude and f(r)iend

Sometimes an artist becomes so successful that they are written blank checks to pursue whatever folly fancies them. Griffith followed The Birth of a Nation with Intolerance, both a riposte to his critics and an expansion of an already overly epic vision. Spielberg followed the one two punch of Jaw and Close Encounters... with 1941, a film that reeks of Hollywood excess. Those who have seen Apocalypse Now Redux will know how close Coppola came to creating an unwatchable fiasco. In the publishing world, it seems that Stephen King and JK Rowling reached a point in their careers in which their popularity prevented helpful input from their editors. Radu Jude seemed to be reaching this point on his last film and has crossed the Rubicon of self-indulgence with Dracula. 

It is not that there aren't any interesting ideas in the film, Dracula is teeming with ideas. There are riffs on past representations of Dracula on film and in literature. There is much rumination on the traumas of Romanian history, Jude's primary preoccupation thus far. There are endless digressions in the post modern style.There is purposefully cheesy AI generated CGI. There is an unreliable narrator. There is a burlesque of vampiric cosplay. There is much lowbrow humor and more phalluses on display than in a locker room. Some of the ideas are good and some fall flat. I laughed more times than when I watched Spaceballs, but Mel Brooks knew enough to keep his farces succinct. Dracula runs almost three hours and never coheres. It is divided into fifteen parts and I would have jettisoned or severely pruned half of them.

If I found Dracula to be Jude's worst film, I still somewhat enjoyed it, but, then, I prefer 1941 to Close Encounters. Like 1941, Dracula has the virtue of an antic and lunatic vision despite its indulgent excess. Life seems to be imitating art in that a theme park called Dracula Land is opening in Romania in 2027. One thing that buoys me is that the player who gives the best performance in Dracula, Eszter Tompa, stars in Jude's upcoming film, Kontinental '25, which opens in the US on March 27th.