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Jonathan Cohen and Alain Chabat, here in “Le Vertige” by Quentin Dupieux.
Don’t expect a visual slap in the face, as for Arco. It has nothing to do with it, and that’s (perhaps) so much the better. The most prolific French director, Quentin Dupieux, made his return to the cinema this Wednesday, June 10 in the company of Jonathan Cohen and Alain Chabat with his first animated film, a comedy with the ugliest design called Vertigo.
His story loses nothing of the filmmaker’s zany spirit. One fine morning, Jacques shows up unexpectedly at the house of his best friend, Bruno. He must urgently inform her of his latest discovery. No, he’s not sick. It’s worse. The world they live in does not exist. It’s a simulation. And it has proof: 265 bugs to be exact.
Among them, a pigeon flying into the void in a sewer pipe. A baker whose one hand has eight fingers, too. “Everything is bogus“, assures Bruno, certain of having cracked the system. His boyfriend is suspicious, but ends up believing him. Together, they will get their hands on the truth. It involves mirrors.
Shh, let’s say no more. Let’s instead talk about its aesthetics, a major curiosity of the film. The texture of the faces is outdated. The characters look like polygons worthy of an old Playstation video game, worse than The Sims. It’s a failure, too, for the synchronization of the lips and the dialogues (twisting, on the other hand).
Discover the trailer for the Vertigo :
Far from the infinity of possibilities made possible by animation, the camera is fixed. It looks like it is placed in the same place, like in a bad French film (the first scene takes place in a kitchen). What’s the fault? Blender, the free software they used? No, the teams of Flow – a jewel praised for its designs, in 2024 – had the same.
Consuérism, IA, Steve Jobs…
Everything is coherent here. A nod to the existential crises into which our worry can lead us, Vertigo – about which it is difficult not to say too much without spoiling the surprise – turns out to be smarter than it seems, particularly in his speech on the consumerism of new technologies.
Against the grain of existentialism, which wants a human being to form the essence of his life through his choices, the film asks a philosophical question: are we really a reflection of ourselves, or are we not rather that of our capitalist society? Take Steve Jobs, whom Quentin Dupieux caricatures in his satire.
It’s funny, but above all very effective in a world like ours, where the use of AI raises questions beyond the cinema industry, particularly in the permanent search for the reproduction of the perfect image. None of that here. The film embraces a return to craftsmanship.
A risky bet, like its production. The voices of the four actors were recorded over the space of just two or three days, before the images were created. They are the work of a small group of recently graduated Gobelins students, who were asked to produce an aesthetic far from the over-the-top blockbusters of the genre.
« It’s my dizziness»
Quentin Dupieux was looking to renew himself. He jumped into it without really knowing where he was going. “It’s my dizziness to dive into something and start writing automatically.a-t-il confié à Brut à Cannes, où son film a clôturé la Quinzaine. Sometimes it doesn’t work, often even. On the other hand, when I find a nugget, I do something with it. »
The conspiratorial belief that our world is the result of a computer simulation is not new, as has already been demonstrated Matrix at the cinema. She was even recently approached by the journalist Loïc Hecht in an investigation (La Simulationat the Arenas) on those who track down its glitches, its faults.
« This has been drilled into our heads for a long timeexplains the filmmaker, still at Brut. It’s a fun idea. I have another idea: we’re just a little piece of meat on a big stone. But everything is possible. […] It’s as stupid a topic as the earth is flat, but the fact that it’s a topic is fascinating.»The idea of a second part is already running through his head. We hope that it will be just as “poorly” done.
