‘Full Phil’ review: Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson head to Paris in Quentin Dupieux’s latest whimsical film

Americans might make a bit of a fuss about how good the food is in Paris, however A whole elephant It takes this idea to ridiculous extremes. All the while, visiting tourist Madeline (Kristen Stewart) is stuffing her face with all sorts of meat, vegetables, and carbs while her father, Phil (Woody Harrelson), is the one whose stomach is miraculously inflating. Meanwhile, when she’s not bickering with her father, she’s watching a very low-budget black-and-white creature movie on her portable DVD player about a swamp thing that has a taste for human heads, and a hotel employee (Charlotte Le Bon) is by her side to protect her lest Phil becomes violent.

It’s all business as usual for the French multi-hyphenate and master of his own self-made eccentric style, Quentin Dupieux, who returns with his latest work – a lean, slightly mediocre slice of what the hell was – the kind of fun that can be likened to what you would get if Troma made films written by Samuel Beckett.

Keep in mind that given Dupieux’s prolific production, it’s not like he’s been away for long. Release him Piano accident Just last year, and The second law the previous year, although this is a slightly slower pace compared to the two-film-per-year production he had previously achieved. This represents a bit of a shift as he is working with American actors again for the first time in a while. (Maybe it was the last effort Wrong cops In 2013, if you don’t count short films and music videos for the likes of Charli XCX.)

This has arguably the largest cast ever, and Dupieux rewards their faith in him by assembling a script that feels more polished than usual – a surreal story with a fitting ending for a change, though we’re not exactly talking Guy de Maupassant or Flannery O’Connor levels of narrative elegance here. For example, the utterly ridiculous B-story feels like it was conceived to avoid running time, perhaps an exercise in destined to be another project that didn’t intentionally waste the talents of Emma Mackey, who gets a plodding role as the monster’s first victim. Her distressed screams are gas, at least.

The main takeaway, of course, is prepared by Stewart in the rare purely comedic role and Harrelson in his more predictable form, in both cases a bit broader and less polished than feels entirely at ease. Neither of them was convinced that they fully understood Dupieux’s joke, or even sure that the joke wasn’t on them either. As is the case with The second lawwhich sent up cancel culture, there’s a slightly retro vibe in the way the screenplay represents Stewart’s Madeleine as a distinctly millennial kind of passive-aggressiveness. As she sits in their hotel suite, stuffing her face with plate after glass-covered plate of room service food, she keeps flipping the script back on her father every time he gets angry or dares to protest the decision of hotel employee Lucie (Le Bon from White lotus(Very funny) For insisting on staying in the room in case Madeline is attacked.

Meanwhile, Phil is read as a French stereotype of a squeamish, clean-obsessed, arrogant American, who is so ashamed of the fact that Madeleine has clogged the toilet in his half of the suite that he won’t let maintenance come to fix the clog, perhaps because they think it’s his feces and not hers. “Everyone poops, Dad,” she counters with understandable, if agitated, exasperation, noting that maintenance workers don’t mind working with stuff in toilets anymore, any more than hairdressers don’t mind touching heads all day. With a long history of near estrangement between the two, they have been unable to reach any agreement on toilets. So they move on to criticize Phil’s desire to work on their tenuous relationship, which Madeline dismisses, calling it the part where he “repeats all the shrink’s bullshit,” which is a telling choice of words.

Stewart is perhaps at her best when she delivers those crude, infuriating lines, with a sarcasm that she clearly relishes. Likewise, for someone whose fashion sense, cold, indifferent air, and physical appearance have been an idol to the public ever since she became a supernova with… twilight In the movies, she seems to enjoy playing around with that chic, Chanel-clad image here, constantly stuffing her belly, grabbing fatty steaks from her hands and nibbling the meat off the bone. The effect is like an anti-anorexia commercial.

But as the film goes on, the arc cools down a bit, and there’s a strange, real feel to a speech in which she tries to bond with Phil, who at the end of the film looks like he’s about to give birth to twins, so bloated with food is his belly. Fans Monty Python meaning of life You may begin to feel uncomfortable flashbacks to the fate of Mr. Creosote, who had one mint too many.

Who can say for sure what Dupieux is trying to say here. There seems to be something about how love, food, and familial feelings can turn brutal, a point faintly echoed in the stupid B-movie starring Tim Heidecker and Doppio’s old friend Eric Wareheim. Meanwhile, there’s a really funny joke about how oblivious American tourists are to what’s going on locally in the countries they visit. Phil steps outside the hotel to get a cigarette, completely unfazed by the riots going on all around that include a burning car in the background and armored French police beating protesters with clubs. Later, someone throws a Molotov cocktail at the taxi Phil and Madeleine are taking to a restaurant, and the taxi driver sighs and suggests that it would be faster if they got out and walked given the impact on traffic. Haven’t we all felt the same inconvenience while on vacation?

Some might see the blood-soaked final climax as a convenient way to end things, but the performances of both Stewart and Harrelson — all at this point, or at least in tune with Doppio’s antics — somehow sell it emotionally. The eerie, turbulent electronic score by Siriusmo (German EDM producer Moritz Friedrich) really enhances the atmosphere of whimsy, strangeness and a subtle kind of melancholy, a uniquely Dupieux-ian combination that is all the director’s own.