Mandibles (2021)

Quentin Dupieux has spent a career constructing small, deadpan machines of absurdity, and Mandibles is one of his tidier models. Two men of limited intellect, Jean-Gab and Manu, discover a giant fly lodged in the trunk of a stolen car and resolve to train it into a fortune. What follows is a road movie of sorts, performed with the flat affect of a nature documentary. The film premiered at Venice in 2020 and then waited out the pandemic before reaching French theaters. By the standards of our current classificatory duties, it is an almost barren specimen, which is not the same as a dull one.

The single progressive ripple arrives via Adèle Exarchopoulos, whose character Agnès was reportedly inspired by Greta Thunberg. The gesture is satirical and glancing, an environmental echo rather than a crusade, and the film never returns to the subject. The scheme to profit from a trained insect reads as comedic greed, not a critique of capital. Nothing here suggests a director reaching for a thesis about markets or extraction. The ensemble is a standard French-Belgian arrangement of white performers, assembled without evident design.

Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. No romantic or identity subtext complicates the central friendship. The leads are simple-minded for the sake of slapstick, not as advocacy for any neurological condition. Race never enters the frame as a subject. Gender politics are absent entirely, the women functioning as obstacles and oddities in a male farce. And the film refuses to lecture. Dupieux's humor depends on withholding judgment, on letting a giant fly be a giant fly. We are left with a comedy of pure premise, well aged, faintly political by accident, and determined to say nothing at all.