Rubber: An Homage To No Reason
RUBBER (Blu-ray)
Optimum Releasing
Release date: April 11th 2011
Certificate (UK): 15
Running time: 79 minutes
Director: Quentin Dupieux
Cast: Stephen Spinella, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser, Roxane Mesquida, Ethan Cohn, Charley Koontz, Daniel Quinn, Devin Brochu, Hayley Holmes, Haley Ramm, Cecelia Antoinette, David Bowe
Quentin Dupieux (aka Mr. Oizo), the French musician who had me bopping like Flat Eric with his minimal techno track, Flat Beat, back in 1999 has been delving into the filmmaking arena for some time now.
Nonfilm (2002), his first feature as writer and director, was about a young actor who realises he’s in a film he doesn’t understand. The crew decide to carry on without a script, despite the fact that he’s already accidentally shot some of them.
His second venture, Steak (2007), was a futuristic dystopian take on cosmetic surgery.
Now comes Rubber (2010), a surreal film-within-a-film black comedy that breaks the fourth wall and addresses the absurdity of reality and our limited realm of perception.
Set in the California desert where a group of bizarre characters assemble to watch the events of the film play out, Robert, a tyre possessed by the soul of Robert, rises, dusts himself off and takes to the road to explore his new-found psychokinetic powers by blowing up birds and bunny rabbits before moving on to humans.
- Interview: Quentin Dupieux (8.32)
- Interview: Jack Plotnick (6.42)
- Interview: Stephen Spinella (4.07)
- Interview: Roxane Mesquida (3.28)
- Teaser Test (0.48)
- Trailer (1.28)
Robert then stops by the Easy Rest-Inn for some R&R but is soon distracted by the alluring young woman he was about to blow up on the highway earlier, before he was rudely run over by a passing car.
As Lieutenant Chad (Stephen Spinella) wryly explains, sometimes in films, things happen for no reason at all. There’s a lot of that going on here as Rubber makes no attempt to elaborate on anything, but merely point out the absurdity of it.
In doing so, its closing comment on Hollywood is particularly admirable but along the way I couldn’t help but feel it was a little tiring and perhaps would have worked better as a short film rather than a feature length one.
Dupieux doesn’t disappoint with the score though. Collaborating with Gaspard Auge, they produce one which is both quintessentially French and has depth when it comes to scenes such as where Robert comes across a field of burning tyres.
Taking their cues from Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, their synthesisers culminate in the brilliance of Tricycle Express which brings the film to a memorable close
Part 3 of the Live Evil series continues to celebrate horror as Frances Taylor brings us a tale of extreme isolation and societal distrust with John Carpenter’s The Thing.
After Ruggero Deodato shocked audiences with Cannibal Holocaust he returned a year later with another shocker, the rape and revenge thriller The House On the Edge of the Park.
In the years of the Weimar Republic, Germany would see a flourishing of creativity that crossed all borders from art and literature, into music and film.
Sophie Fiennes shows us the “Gesamtkunstwerk” of visual artist Anselm Kiefer, deep in the process of creation, in Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow.
Majestic, soaring and angelic; David Arnold creates a breathtaking score for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader incorporating the themes from the first two films.
