Relatively speaking, 2014’s “Li’l Quinquin” was a game changer for uncompromising, DGAF filmmaker Bruno Dumont; an acquired taste even for the difficult French cinema crowd. Up until this point, Dumont— the heir apparent to Robert Bresson, who, like his forefather often uses non-professional actors as his leads —had made almost exclusively, austere visions of despair. Dumont crafted divisive, severe, spiritualist dramas with an extremist, provocative bent—think the uglier lack of humanity side of Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat and Lars Von Trier, with a slow, formally rigorous intellectualism sometimes off-putting to even the most devout cinephile.
Dumont, then made a jagged left turn into slapstick black comedy for “Li’l Quinquin,” an absurdist, existentialist black comedy murder mystery/improbably police procedural— maybe a little bit like a cross between “True Detective,” “Laurel and Hardy” and well, Bruno “Capital A art film” Dumont— about a rapscallion little boy in Northern France coming of age while European xenophobia rises and two bumbling Keystone cops trying to find the killer behind grotesquely mutilated body parts stuffed inside cows in a habitually docile seaside town.
“Li’l Quinquin,” hilarious and still enigmatic, opaquely distancing and yet the first time audiences found character identification in his work, was easily Dumont’s most expansive work, his warmest, his funniest, his most WTF— oh and did I mention?—a three and a half hour film/mini-series hybrid presented at Cannes as a film, but presented months later as a limited series on French TV (and apparently conceived and shot as a project that could live those two dual lives). And while you were pettily arguing last year whether David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” was TV or film, France’s prestigious, prescient and notoriously snobby Sight and Sound had named “Li’l Quinquin,” the best movie of the year—that not a soul in America saw—three years earlier.
Since then, Dumont has veered further off into the bizarre: another seaside comedy, this time a period piece about class and cannibal peasants (“Slack Bay”) and a medieval heavy metal musical about Joan Of Arc (“Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc”).
His fourth project in this career detour jag is the sequel to “Li’l Quinquin.” Titled “CoinCoin and the Extra-Humans,” this new mini-series is another existentialist adventure that follows the same characters and same provincial town several years later. However, it’s far less sinister, leaning further into the ridiculous with funny, yet mixed results that actually make one yearn for the more inscrutable and challenging Dumont (it’s four episodes long, around an hour each).
The formally pre-pubescent shit-disturber P’tit Quinquin (Alane Delhaye), is now a teenager that goes by CoinCoin, his former girlfriend (Lucy Caron) is gay, but much remains the same otherwise… superficially anyhow. The incompetent Captain Roger van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) and his constabulary sidekick Rudy Carpentier (Philippe Jore) are still policing petty, inconsequential crime, and the influx of African émigrés are still unsettling the locals.
The strange twist of ‘Coincoin,’ which never addresses the unsolved murders of ‘Quinquin,’ which left the original series on a bleak, grim note—the mysterious, unknowingness of evil— is a black magma substance that is falling from the skies (very much akin to an unexpected pie smash into the face every so often). It is not of this world, extra-terrestrial, and clearly, Dumont is trying to use it as a clumsy metaphor for foreigners, but it’s never quite clear what the director is saying other than, yes, we’re almost always afraid of the unknown. The black goop terrorizing the municipality in a way an epidemic of seagulls shitting everywhere might, eventually unleashes something more ominous—some kind of celestial alien form—which possesses the locals and creates doppelgängers (“My clown!” van der Weyden repeats continually, trying to say clone) that are farted out of the original human (no, really).
With duplicates of Côte d’Opale roaming around and congregating—conspiring a takeover? — it is up to the Captain and Carpentier, with a little help from CoinCoin and his gang, to solve the mystery of this abnormality that the inspectors are worried will bring forth the apocalypse.
A kind of double inverted self-parody, ‘CoinCoin’ is kind of a preposterous victory lap and intentional greatest hits that revels in and mocks the ideas of sequels and itself. “It’s funny once or twice, not six times!” the Captain yells at Carpentier and the series’ self-aware tendency to overdo the same pratfall-ish gag (which in itself is rather hysterical).
All the same shit happens: Carpentier is still pulling his moronic police car stunts (driving precariously on two wheels), CoinCoin’s mentally challenged uncle is still running around like a goof, and the inescapable, dead-endedness of the township still hangs over everyone with existential dread.
What’s evolved somewhat, is its socio-political texture, commenting on the small-mindedness of Northern France (where Dumont is from), even though it still simmers in the background. CoinCoin and his BFF buddy Fatso (Julien Bodart) are low-level grunts for the white nationalist group, Le Bloc—modeled on Marine Le Pen’s National Rally—and the Captain’s odious xenophobia for the squatters and immigrants invading the settlement like a zombie caravan is even turning off the normally-loyal Carpentier (and admittedly, some of it extremely repellant).
The brilliance of ‘Quinquin,’ was the way it fused the preoccupations of Dumont—his harsh, co-existing ideas of hope and doom and the unmasking of the inherently ugly side of humanity through the grisly and grotesque—with this newfound lighter side of screwball-ish humor; a completely unique marriage. When was the last time you saw Bresson or Bergman mashed together with Peter Sellers‘ Inspector Clouseau, The Marx Brothers, and a soupçon of Abbott and Costello?
‘Coincoin,’ on the other hand, retains its comedic flair, but unfortunately has very little to say about the good and evil that wrestles inside all of us; a portentous concept thread through the original. Yet, if ‘CoinCoin’ is otherwise too familiar at times, and it is, the twitchy Charlie Chaplin-esque mustache-face of Pruvost and his character’s riotous ineptness still provides uproarious laughter (one could write sonnets dedicated to the beautiful facial symphony that is his Tourettes-like tics and spasms). He and Carpentier’s blundering, bickering dynamic is endlessly funny, but the entire project is still likely a confounding head-scratcher for the regular moviegoing bystander.
Ultimately, “CoinCoin and the Extra-Humans” reveals itself to be a farcical socio-political riff on “Invasion of The Body Snatchers,” minus the eerie terror of it all. And really, it’s for Dumont completists only. And likely, unless Dumont is a sadist (well…) this feels very much like the end of the ‘Quinquin’ saga (it must be said its conclusion is one of the most inane and yet beautifully ludicrous things I’ve witnessed in some time). “CoinCoin and the Extra-Humans” doesn’t achieve the glorious heights of disfigured absurdity, tragedy, and humanity the way ‘Quinquin’ does—a series that grew progressively darker, disturbing, but more affecting. Yet, as nutty, similar and less ambitious as it is, ‘Coincoin’s parade of the nonsensical still possesses a delightful pageantry. [B]
‘CoinCoin & The Extra-Humans recently screened at the Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal. It has aired on French television already and is playing select film festivals around the globe now. Your best bet may end up being a DVD somewhere down the road.