Reality

A French production built from narratives nested inside each other. Jason is a cameraman on a television programme. He wants to make his own horror film and pitches the idea to a producer. The producer sets one condition: the film must contain the best groan in the history of cinema. Jason is given forty-eight hours to find that sound. Other lines turn around this one. A girl wonders what is inside a videotape she saw in a film. A director is shooting a school film. A man itches constantly and his doctor can find nothing. A television host presents a cookery show in a rat costume. At some point which line sits inside which becomes uncertain: someone watches a film seen in a dream, and inside that film someone else is shooting the same scene. The humour is calm and the register flat; no strangeness is underlined. Alain Chabat, Jonathan Lambert, Élodie Bouchez and Jon Heder are in the cast. Quentin Dupieux directed; he usually shoots and edits his own films as well. Exactly right for anyone who likes narrative puzzles and strange comedy. For a viewer waiting for an explanation, the film unties no knots and has no intention of doing so.