Reality

le meilleur film de quentin dupieux, avec des acteurs tous meilleurs les uns que les autres

Reality is a feature-length film directed by Quentin Dupiex. Like perceived reality, Reality is alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, boring and fascinating. Like real reality, it simply is what it is, and it is unpredictable and most often incomprehensible. Reality is the name of a little girl, the daughter of a hunter, who sees something fall from the gutted boar her father dresses. What comes out of the guts of the butchered boar is a whole VHS video cassette. But what is on that blue video tape? This facet of the story is not quite a vignette, but one reflection in a hall of mirrors of narrative that takes place within a broader story of a cameraman (Alain Chabat) who would be director, if a producer would be willing to finance his idea for a horror film. The producer will produce only if our would-be director can record the greatest groan in cinematic history. Alain Chabat as Jason Tanta is charmingly bewildered and determined. The rest of the cast is excellent and the inclusion of Americans Jon Heder and Eric Wareheim in this French film suggest laughs, but it’s bewilderment that is the sustained note. Kyla Kenedy plays Reality perfectly, without a false moment. Reality is not necessarily symbolic, but it’s also not existential. Reality approaches the surreal, but at the edge, dives into society’s Dada pool where it struggles and thrashes, submerged in the nightmarish mundane. Reality is positioned near the top of the list of the strangest movies I have ever seen. Director Dupiex has ventured into this boundary-blurring terrain before. In his first film, called NonFilm (2002), which is described as comedy, an actor awakens mid-movie shoot in utter confusion. The crew is accidentally killed, but the actors continue on, shooting the rest of their film without camera or script. Curiously, after watching Reality, my wife and I browsed a local thrift shop and I found a used DVD of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, NY. Watching it the same day was a mystical experience and I wondered if I had fallen into Reality. Comparisons could be made with Synecdoche, NY, but Dupiex has used narrative and the self-referencing construction of film stories (within stories) in a deconstructive way that points more to the function of the viewer. Pointing to the process of comprehension (or non-comprehension) places the viewer in a more present role, and in Reality, thematic concerns have seemingly been replaced by story-telling techniques, giving it a post-modern sensibility. Reality is the kind of movie some people will not be able to watch all the way through. But it is a movie some will watch many times, puzzling over the ultimate question, “What is Reality?” Reality is a feature-length film directed by Quentin Dupiex…