Kritiken

L'il Quinquin is another one of Dumont's allegories of grace and cruelty, but this time, it's served with self-awareness, slapstick hijinks, impressively unprofessional police work, and adventurously bad driving. And the thing about the humor is that it doesn't dilute the vision, but complicate it, finally allowing it to evolve.

It's a singular treat: a Twin Peaks-twisted mystery, set in starkest rural France yet executed with the knockabout flair of a Keystone Cops jape... as the bumbling investigation snakes circuitously around a community riddled with eccentrics and malcontents, a peculiarly warm feeling for human failing settles in; antic farce turns out to be as suitable a vessel for Dumont's spiritual preoccupations as dour allegory, and a good deal more fun.

Presented in its unedited 200 minutes, this is big-screen binge-watching, and offers a meandering, ramshackle portrait of the state of a nation rather than the usual arc-and-resolution structure expected of a feature film. Yet the series' place in the cinema is fully justified by Guillaume Deffontaines' 'Scope lensing, which maintains a comically panoramic distance from all the pastoral perversity on display.

The fact remains: P'tit Quinquin really is funny, in a sometimes surprisingly broad, knockabout way, while being utterly recognisable as the work of one of Europe's most intransigently distinctive auteurs.

Mr. Dumont has denied ever seeing "Twin Peaks," but the giggly priest and the hauntingly avant-garde ballad of teenage angst yodeled in phonetic English by the town's would-be superstar (Lisa Hartmann, who wrote the song herself) are as suggestive of David Lynch's series as the episode in which two British tourists fail to contain the restaurant antics of their grown, mentally disturbed son is of Lars von Trier's "The Idiots.

P'tit Quinquin is as expansive a portrait as Dumont has made of the hidden fears, depravities, and moralities that govern rural life. Combining a darkly comedic detective drama with a youthful coming-of-age narrative, Dumont creates a painterly film in which pastoral landscapes meld with expressive, character-filled faces.

Dumont so deftly mixes comedy with a sort of existential horror that perhaps what's most surprising are the moments of real tenderness and warmth--Quinquin's unhesitating defense of his mentally handicapped uncle, his loving relationship with his girlfriend, Eve. This is the film's greatest strength (and what keeps it engaging for all of it's three hours and seventeen minutes) --characters who are at once monstrous, ridiculous, and deeply touching.

The comedy in Li'l Quinquin makes you giddy with pleasure, but leads you into that thought-provoking, dangerous zone where you have to check if you are laughing with the characters or at them—or perhaps if they are laughing at you. Li'l Quinquin is sui generis. It feels like nothing if not a Bruno Dumont movie, though anyone who enjoyed the knotting of laughter and the macabre in Twin Peaks will want to see it.

[One scene at a funeral] is sad, then hilarious, then tedious, then bizarre, then disturbing. The more you watch it, the less you know what to think. The same could be said for Li'l Quinquin itself, which starts off like it might be France's answer to Twin Peaks, then begins to feel like Robert Bresson was asked to make True Detective with the cast of Freaks. That sounds insensitive, but it's hard to pin down just exactly what Dumont wants us to think here.

Saying "P'tit Quinquin" is Dumont's funniest and warmest film doesn't count for much, but could I interest you in one of the sharpest autocritiques in recent memory? Dumont's real trick isn't spinning his iconic imagery for laughs, but doing so without straying from his usual mission of investigating the extent to which humans can possibly be modeled after God in the most violent imaginable terms. That's having your cake and eating it in ways Lars Von Trier could only dream of.

Such injections of levity, coupled with fewer grotesque provocations than Dumont generally favors, make Li'l Quinquin one of his more accessible works. His stubborn refusal to provide closure, however, gets magnified here, with the shrug of an ending coming across as especially unsatisfying due to the project's unusual length.

Through these various chess pieces, Dumont reveals his interest in the ways both ideology and cinema are necessarily predicated on fine lines separating polarities, where religious ritual melds with pop fodder and austere drama quickly gives way to slapstick shenanigans. Most impressive, then, is that all of the principal characters are first-time actors, with Dumont finding Bressonian inspiration amid Pasolinian grotesqueries.