Keep an Eye Out

Quentin Dupieux's film, set in a police station and running almost entirely in one room. Fugain finds a body covered in blood outside his building and calls the police. Which makes him the suspect. Commissioner Buron takes him in for questioning, and the questioning fills the whole night. The structure looks simple, but Dupieux does not tell it simply: as the man's account is dramatised, the interrogation room and the scene being described bleed into each other, characters walk into their own memories, and time breaks its own rules. The humour is built on the absurd; events are not tied off with a rational explanation, the strangeness is not justified, and the film does not consider that a problem. Dupieux had made films in English before; this is counted among his first features that are wholly French in production and in sensibility. Benoît Poelvoorde plays the commissioner and Grégoire Ludig the man being questioned. Poelvoorde won the Magritte Award for best actor. Before you watch, know this: the film explains nothing, and refusing to explain is the point. For a viewer who does not get on with that kind of humour eighty minutes may feel long; for anyone who likes absurd comedy and single-location experiments it is exactly the right size.