French musician and filmmaker Quentin Dupieux has found steady distribution stateside, with his Keep an Eye Out (released in France in 2018) following last year’s Deerskin, and his Mandibles on the way. He works in a tradition of absurdist comedy that can either be hilarious or fall flat. Unfortunately, Keep an Eye Out plays like middlebrow TV with pretensions to the avant-garde meta notions of Jacques Rivette and Raúl Ruiz. It’s enamored of gamesmanship around the plastic nature of reality. But when its playfulness isn’t very funny and doesn’t reveal any insights, Keep an Eye Out quickly starts to feel utterly pointless — and it’s barely feature-length, reaching the closing credits in about 65 minutes.
In the opening scene, a half-naked man stands in as the conductor for an orchestra performing in a park before being chased away by the cops. Fugain (Grégoire Ludig) finds a body covered in blood outside the apartment building where he lives. After reporting the corpse to the police, he’s called in for questioning by Capt. Buron (Benoît Poelvoorde), but the situation keeps getting stranger as they talk all night. Buron hides the death of a man who suffered the bizarre fate of being stabbed in the eyeball by a protractor.
Keep an Eye Out conjures up a ’70s that only really existed in TV and movies. Despite Poelvoorde’s long career as a comedic actor in Belgium and France, Americans might know him best as the serial killer in 1992’s Man Bites Dog who charms the audience until his crimes become too real to deny. With brown hair and a thick mustache (amazingly, it’s real), Ludig could’ve been a stunt double for Tom Selleck on Magnum P.I. The film is mostly confined to one set, where the interrogation takes place, and the cinematography and costumes are dominated by the color brown.
Dupieux’s direction is fairly minimal and restrained — his storytelling is not. It nestles flashbacks within reveals, reveling in its own ability to mess with the audience’s head. However, when character and plot become arbitrary, something needs to replace them. In Deerskin, Jean Dujardin dug into his character’s bizarre obsession with buying every deerskin jacket in the world with real gusto: His performance never winked at the audience, and as odd as the film was, it had something to say about consumerism.
Keep an Eye Out is in love with its narrative at the expense of substance. It invokes the worst aspects of the British TV show Inside No. 9, a darkly comedic single-set program that closes each episode with a gimmicky twist. The ending of Keep an Eye Out suggests that no matter how much artifice this film acknowledges, its characters are still trapped by its story. But it never develops enough gravity for one to care. As Jordan Mintzer wrote for The Hollywood Reporter, “What all this is truly about is anyone’s guess.”
