Surrealism has a long tradition in film — film students all over the world are still required to watch Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí‘s An Andalusian Dog — though it certainly is not a style that has ever taken hold in mainstream cinema. David Lynch‘s movies are about as mainstream as surrealism gets, and his movies won’t be topping the box office charts anytime soon.
It’s hard to describe Wrong by writer/director/editor Quentin Dupieux — the real name of French electronic musician Mr. Oizo — as a filmmaker as anything else but a surrealist comedian. His last film, 2010’s Rubber, featured a tire that gained sentience and killed people with its physic powers. While that sentence should immediately sound stupid to you, the way you interpret it (“So stupid that I would never watch it” vs. “So stupid that I must watch it”) tells you if you’ll enjoy Dupieux’s films or not. Though a brief description of the plot of Wrong, which debuted at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, might seem to make more sense than Rubber, it’s just as surrealistic as a killer tire.
The plot of Wrong can be boiled down to a severely depressed man named Dolph Springer (Jack Plotnick) who wakes up one morning to discover that his dog Paul is missing. He eventually discovers that a dog guru named Master Chang (William Fichtner) — who is not Asian but demonstrates all the characteristics of the stereotypical Asian master — kidnapped his dog in order to teach Dolph to love his dog more. Unfortunately, the kidnapping went wrong and Chang does not know where Paul has gone. There are other storylines too, including one with Dolph’s gardener, Victor (Éric Judor) — who appears to be a stereotypical Hispanic landscaper until he opens his mouth and speaks with a heavy French accent — discovering that the palm tree in Dolph’s backyard has surprisingly changed into a pine tree, and the insanely driven Detective Lonnie’s (Steve Little) search for Paul using the dog’s feces.
So yes, it’s fair to say most of the film is filled with nonsense non sequiturs, although what I did get out of it was a sly commentary on film stereotypes. Along with the above characters, who each seem to represent a common cinema archetype, is Emma (Alexis Dziena), a bubbly and clingy worker in a pizza shop who instantly falls in love with Dolph over the phone and decides to leave her husband and move in with him. Obviously her character is an idiot, but I’d argue that she’s no more idiotic than the brain dead one-dimensional protagonists in romantic comedies. In a Sarah Jessica Parker movie audiences would dismiss criticism of a character like Emma by just saying “it’s a movie,” yet the same audiences would be driven crazy by Emma’s character in Wrong because “she doesn’t make sense” (note: she’s not supposed to). Likewise, Dolph’s character seems to be a reflection of the type of dour, sad-sack characters that Steve Carell plays in almost all of his films (and Plotnick’s voice even sounds like Carell
‘s) pushed to the extremities of dourness. I think Dupieux is essentially asking if audiences can buy into characters who are inherently unrealistic, why not keep pushing the unrealistic aspects of them? Why do we still always expect film characters to play by real-world rules when film has never presented realistic stories in the true sense of “realism”? (I think it’s worth pointing out here that Dupieux is currently working on a film titled Réalité, the French word for “reality.” That should be fun.)
Then again, the surrealistic aspects are fun even if you don’t expect them to “mean” anything. For example, though Dolph was fired from his job he still shows up everyday and pretends to work because he says he “likes” being there. However, Dolph’s nondescript office is deluged by rain, something he nor anyone else he works with seems to notice (and yes, they are indoors). I guess one could interpret this as workers ignoring the world around them because they’re too engrossed with being bombarded in the menial jobs, or one can simply see it as an oddity meant to elicit laughter… or a combination of the two. Wrong is filled with these absurd moments, each more absurd than the last.
I stress that Wrong is not a film that mainstream audiences would enjoy, and even those who profess that they love “quirky” comedies like Napoleon Dynamite or Wet Hot American Summer will not be prepared for a film like Wrong. I imagine most people who watch it will have a harsh reaction to its absurdities. However, I honestly believe that if you view it as a surrealistic take on mainstream movie stereotypes there is a lot to enjoy here. Just try not to take any of it seriously.
Rating: For most audiences it might be a 1 or 2, but if you’re willing to hang with Wrong‘s surrealism it’s very likable (7/10).
Drafthouse Films is releasing Wrong on VOD on February 1 and it will have a limited theatrical release beginning March 29.
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