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| Jack Plotnick |
Multi-hyphenate movie maker Quentin Dupieux is someone who cannot be accused of being contrived. In 2010, he released Rubber – a meta comedy of the horror genre and the absurdity of movie logic, all from the perspective of its protagonist: a killer rubber tire. While not a complete success, it was tonally confident and established him as an ambitious young filmmaker. With his latest film, Wrong, he attempts to strike lightning twice with a story centered around a man trying to find his lost dog. Does it continue to show a director with a message, or is he all out of ideas?
The story revolves around Dolph (Jack Plotnick) as he spends a day looking for his beloved canine. He wakes up at 7:60 AM and works in an office that is consistently raining. Compared to everything that follows, this is pretty normal. He also gets involved with a dog psychic (William Fichtner) and a detective (Steve Little) who uses something called “turd vision” to track the dog’s whereabouts. Add in a gardener (Eric Judor) and a delusional employee from a pizza shop (Alexis Dziena), and suddenly everything turns into a surreal narrative. There are consistent changes of scenery and almost nothing makes sense. This doesn’t stop Dolph from going along with things in hopes that he will find his dog soon.
That is the magic of Wrong. By choosing to turn a simple story about a lost pet into a bizarre day-in-the-life tale, it takes a fascinating approach to a very mundane story. It manages to relay a sense of familiarity by accentuating the primal fear of every dog lover. In many ways, Wrong’s choice to populate the story with bizarre animal aficionados works because there is a sense that Dolph loves that dog and will listen to a dog psychic just for the off-chance he can make a breakthrough. However, it is the love that manages to ground the story from ever becoming pointlessly ridiculous.
Jack Plotnick may not be an exceptional actor, but his ability to portray confusion at every turn is a nice touch. William Fichtner as a parody guru named Master Chang is an understated delight. His consistent analogies of canines are absurd, but come from a place of passion. His soft tones and mysterious power over the universe provide a calming, meditative appeal to the story that lets the awkward silence carry the film. The rest of the cast is serviceable and do acceptable jobs. This is mostly because Dupieux’s humor lies in the logic of the universe: a place where a palm tree gets replaced with a pine tree for absolutely no reason. If it doesn’t make sense, it’s because it doesn’t need to. These are all just humorous distractions to the big picture.
While the film succeeds as a love letter to dogs, it also suffers from a pointless subplot. The universe may be confusing, but it all feels justified because of the world’s rules. Then there is Alexis Dziena’s character. Her romantic subplot with Eric Judor and Plotnick is established on intriguing grounds, but becomes useless by the second act. Even from the absurd nonsense standpoint, her character serves no purpose to the story and forces things into the pointlessly weird realm for a good 10 minutes. It feels like filler, and Dziena isn’t exactly a compelling enough actress to make it work. Whereas most other elements connect thematically, this doesn’t.
Overall, Quentin Dupieux succeeds as a filmmaker because his stories are original. Even though Wrong has some problematic elements, his ambition to try different, surreal concepts always keep things interesting. The fact that he managed to symbolize canine love through a cast of creative characters and realistic yet surreal imagery is remarkable. His ambition shines through the cracks, and even his eccentric score under the moniker Tahiti Boy and Mr. Oizo adds a nice, atmospheric touch of electronic music clashing with unorthodox harmonies. It is apparent that he loves this universe, as his next film is called Wrong Cops and yes, it focuses on the police force from Wrong. There is plenty of fascinating texture to be taken out of this universe, and hopefully his spin-off only makes things more bizarre.
Wrong succeeds because it manages to be surreal, but with a heart. Where films like Charles Swan eventually become mean spirited, Dupieux’s story isn’t the case. While it may be nonsensical, and at times goes too far, it rarely feels unwarranted and features something to admire scene to scene. The cast is solid, though William Fichtner steals the show with a brilliantly subtle performance. With odd, spacious imagery and vaguely similar themes running through, this is an ambitious film and succeeds just on that. One can only hope that Dupieux never starts making sense, or maybe his films will fail to be this interesting.
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