"I’m going to play the game". From the outset of his career, the highly prolific and uncategorisable Quentin Dupieux has made no bones about his penchant for social satire, treating his afficionados to playful films bordering on the absurd, with more or less bitter humour and with varying levels of conceptual architecture. With his latest opus, The Piano Accident [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Quentin Dupieux
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It’s a despairing underlayer but, evidently, it doesn’t stop the film from being funny, in the same way that we might laugh by a graveside, because the director doesn’t pull any punches for his major targets: the empty sensationalism of influencers, fame taken to the extreme and the willing subjection of entourages, the toxic supremacy of profit, disconnection from reality which annihilates empathy, a generalised loss of meaning and values also demonstrated by intrusive fans, the amorality of journalism as a means to an end, the collective blindness of humanity as we march towards a society drip-fed all things digital... And it all starts with a bird hurtling against a windscreen in a snowy landscape.

Laying the strange foundations for a story which he himself penned (having also signed his name to the film’s photography, editing and music), Quentin Dupieux follows firmly in the wake of Magalie (a fantastic Adèle Exarchopoulos) who arrives incognito in a 500m2 mountain lodge accompanied by her handyman Patrick (Jérôme Commandeur), who’s been working for the star for ten years. Thirty-something Magalie is a super-rich, world-famous celebrity who’s been clocking up billions of views since adolescence thanks to short, shocking videos which see her defying pain (she has congenital insensitivity) by way of electrocution, a hammer, an ice pick, boiling water, a high-speed baseball bat, a falling washing machine… Anything goes when it comes to hurting herself, because the global audience for "Magaloche" (who’s kept her teenage dental braces for style purposes) is always ready and waiting. But her last performance went very wrong and a journalist (Sandrine Kiberlain) who knows her secret tries to blackmail her: either Magalie agrees to an exclusive interview, or she’ll report her to the police. It’s a state of affairs from which nobody will emerge unscathed…

Unfolding in three parts and across several days, and intertwined with flashbacks on the influencer’s rise to fame, the haywire mechanism of The Piano Accident advances very cleverly and with a slight western air, revolving around a minimalist cast (one protagonist, two secondary roles and Karim Leklou as a ragingly idiotic and oppressive fan). One thing’s for sure, only Quentin Dupieux could offer his French film actors so much room to play and so many possibilities to push the boundaries to their limits. But over and above its delightful and highly inventive troublemaker spirit ("what’s so funny? – The society we’re living in"), the director primarily holds up a dark and caustic mirror ("you’re a horrible person – It’s human nature", "that’s all that matters on this planet: money") to an audience whom he invites (under the theatrical guise of comedy) to look deep into the eyes of the dark reality of modern life.

The Piano Accident was produced by Chi-Fou-Mi Productions in co-production with Arte France Cinéma and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Cinéma. Lucky Number are steering world sales.