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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
RUBBER Rubber is an 85-minute film made by a French electronic musician about a telepathic rubber tire that comes to life and causes heads to explode. Throughout its adventure, the tire, named Robert in the credits, blows up desert animals for sport, develops a crush on Euro art-house cutie Roxanne Mesquida, and vows to eliminate mankind after stumbling upon a mass tire burning. For all that, Rubber has only one real surprise: it’s boring as hell. What could have been the greatest gonzo midnight movie ever made (it even has Wings Hauser as a paraplegic!) estranges itself through repetition and self-conscious narrative nihilism. Plus, it suffers from the Achilles’ heel of avant-garde wackiness, a bloated running time. An hour and a half might not seem like a lot, but with essentially one joke, it feels like a Béla Tarr marathon. It doesn’t help that Rubber is actually an intellectual exercise, of sorts. You see, Robert’s adventures are being watched through binoculars by an “audience,” a badly acted cross-section of what a Frenchman might think is Amurrica. They’re brought to a scratch of dirt in the desert by a mysterious sheriff, who opens the movie by lecturing about his philosophy of “no reason.” That is, there’s “no reason” for anything to occur in cinema—why is E. T. brown, or in one of the film’s out-of-left-field jokes, why did Oskar Schindler save the Jews?
We get it. Why is Robert alive and able to cause remote objects to
explode? No reason! But these pseudo-intellectual justifications belong
in the press notes, not onscreen, where they just feel like
director-writer-editor-noisemaker Quentin Dupieux (who goes by “Mr. Oizo”
when he’s making music) shoving his cleverness in your face. Would-be
cult filmmakers have got to learn that a cult movie is like sex, you
can’t force it. By setting out to make one—with pretentious film school
analyses already included—Dupieux comes off as a try hard.
Brendon Nafziger
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