Rubber (2010)
Directed by Quentin Dupieux

Film Review

By far the weirdest French film of the last decade, Rubber takes us on a bizarre journey into the realm of the absurd and is both breathtakingly original and grotesquely sick.  If  Stephen King and George A. Romero had been minded to attempt a remake of Albert Lamorisse's Le Ballon rouge, this is what it would probably have ended up looking like - a blood-splattered fantasy in which a psychopathic car tyre (named Robert, presumably after the author of Psycho) terrorises a small Californian town (before falling in love).  At first, Rubber feels like the worst B-movie ever-made, and yet whilst it revels in its cheapness and absurdity, it soon becomes strangely compelling.  For the first forty minutes at least, it is hard not to be caught up in the film's indefinable eccentric magic.  It is fair to say that Rubber is a film that is in a class of its own, a true cinematic one-off.

Rubber is the second feature to be directed by Quentin Dupieux, who is better known by his pseudonym Mr Oizo, under which name he has pursued a very successful career as an electro-house musician (closely associated with a popular brand of jeans).   Dupieux's previous film Steak (2007), a comedy featuring the popular double act Eric and Ramzy, was both a major box office flop and a critical failure in France.  Rubber has more in common with Dupieux's first film, a wacky short titled Nonfilm (2002), which shares the meta-film and zany, abstract qualities of his latest off-the-wall production.  What Nonfilm and Rubber have in common is an attempt to explore what cinema is and how we relate to it, flagrantly breaching moviemaking conventions whilst seemingly embracing familiar genres.  Rubber is a cinematic pot pourri that brings together elements of road movie, slasher movie, spaghetti western, black comedy and sci-fi horror film, but what it really is is a statement of the absurdity of cinema.

Whilst Rubber is certainly a provocative and innovative excursion into the wide-blue yonder of the imagination, it is not the easiest of films to sit through.  The greatest challenge it presents is not its gratuitous gore content - the gruesome head explosions, which clearly owe something to David Cronenberg's Scanners (1981) - but its lack of a coherent narrative and characters we can identify with.  Dupieux is right in assuming that a film need not be logical to be appreciated, but the film should at least have some structure to it.  Rubber's brilliant premise is pretty well exhausted by its midpoint, after which the film fails to develop any further and merely fills out the remaining runtime with more of the same, more gory spectacle interspersed with anarchic whimsy.  At this point, if you'll forgive the pun, the film becomes a little tiresome. 

Rubber looks suspiciously as if it was conceived as a short film and stretched (not too difficult, given its title) to a full-length feature.  This shows not only in the uneven pacing and paucity of new content in the film's second half, but also its over-reliance on meta-film gimmicks.  The framing device that the film employs (the tyre's antics are witnessed from a distance by a crowd of spectators) is crude and weakens the film's integrity.  Do we need the main (human) character to face the camera and tell us that the film is without any purpose?  Couldn't we have worked that out for ourselves?  Rubber certainly has great novelty value and probably has what it takes to become a cult classic, but it is a little too self-indulgent and self-conscious to be much more than a quirky cinematic aberration.

Film Synopsis

In the forbidding Californian desert, a killer is on the rampage.  His name is Robert and he is more deadly than you can imagine.  Propelled by an insatiable appetite for destruction, he cannot prevent himself from using his psycho-kinetic powers to explode the heads of every creature he encounters - animals and humans alike.  The strangest thing about Robert is that he looks like an ordinary car tyre.  But appearances can be deceptive.  Not only is Robert an insanely lethal piece of rubber, he is also something of a romantic at heart.  Why else would he be drawn to the attractive woman he comes across during one of his killing sprees?  Alas, the course of true love never did run smoothly, especially if you happen to be a homicidal tyre...