RUBBER – The DVD Review

Review by Cassondra Feltus

From the outset, Rubber displays its love of the possibilities of the ridiculous that the medium of cinema allows for.

A man with an armful of binoculars stands in the middle of the desert as a car approaches, intentionally knocking over a bunch of chairs. The car stops, and a police officer hops out of the trunk with a glass of water in hand. He proceeds to question plot devices from well-known movies, answering each with the simple statement, “No reason.”

His delivery of this deadpan monologue sets the tone.

Do not take this film too seriously; there’s no reason why anything about to unfold does. For example, why does the soon to be revealed main character of the film, an old tire buried in the desert sand, awaken and begin a homicidal trajectory, graduating from bottles and birds to blowing up people’s heads? No reason. But it’s highly entertaining.

Anything is possible when everything is falling apart.

Rubber follows the old tire’s bloody journey through a framing device. Anything in its path explodes: bottles, animals, people. However, we are not the only ones watching this tire’s discovery and practice of its powers. The camera pulls back from that opening monologue to reveal an audience of about a dozen tourists, who have been brought out to the desert to watch Robert’s adventures from afar through binoculars.

The cop eventually seems to be both acting in and directing this “movie,” as the spectators refer to it, although Robert proves to be a less-than-pliant performer.

Slowly closing the space between the viewers and the “actors” until they’re part of the same drama, French writer/director/cinematographer/editor/composer Quentin Dupieux mounts a critique of passive audiences. In the fashion of Fellini and Godard, Dupieux constantly alerts the audience that they are, indeed watching a film. He employs a sort of Greek chorus of spectators to this end, an audience within the film that comments on the film within the film and talks directly to the audience outside the film, while simultaneously functioning as an integral part of the plot. These intervals are amusing, serving to propel the film along and maintain its sense of the bizarre. A living tire with psychokinetic powers is absurd, but even more absurd if people are watching with binoculars in the desert.

Dupieux successfully blends elements of horror, grindhouse exploitation, and absurdist comedy, while also containing certain codes and cliches of the fantasy, science fiction genre. It definitely has that “beamed down from somewhere else” quality. It carries a social text about movie-making in general, and the notion that the movies stop existing the moment we stop watching, but not in a pretentious way.

The cinematography is where the film truly gains its cinematic quality. Rubber was shot on a small digital camera, but the California desert-scape in which it’s set gives it an expansive feel. The film makes use of hard focus to lure your attention away from the inconsistency of the background toward the right objects, completely pulling you into the narrative.

He earns my admiration for the fact that the film was shot in two weeks, in live locations, while performing stop-motion animation, with no CGI. Even the most seasoned and acclaimed directors could easily make a terrible piece of work with that kind of low budget and scarce production methods.

Considering Dupieux’s primary role as a musician, the film’s score is quite understated. Dupieux (aka Mr. Oizo) provides an atmospheric easy listening electronic production that adds to rather than sets the mood. It is not until the end of the film that an ominous and bumping track hits, appropriately setting up the end of the story.

Ultimately, Rubber is a movie that is trying to forget about all other movies. It is intentionally, determinedly random in its plotting, so the laughs come and go scene by scene rather than building up comic momentum. If it was strictly a horror-comedy, or a post-modernist art film, it probably would not be enough to sustain the movie on its own. It barely manages to fill out an hour and a half with both of them intact. But with both facets taken together, Dupieux breaks down the walls between the movie’s internal audience and the story of Robert, and between us and those two merging worlds.

Rubber is truly a love-it or hate-it film. If you are expecting too much, you will be disappointed.