QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM MOTELX

A piano is held in midair by a strap – and when the strap suddenly snaps, the piano plummets. This image opening Quentin Dupieux’s The Piano Accident serves both to literalise and to mystify its title. For at this point that piano, surreally defamiliarised, whether aloft in suspense or rapidly returning to solid ground, from its proper use and place, is also utterly decontextualised, so that we have no idea how or why the instrument came to be there, or the precise nature of the ‘accident’ – and indeed we will not find out until some way into the film. Similarly the title itself will not appear on the screen until some 55 minutes into the film, near the end of the second of its three formally and plainly numbered chapters. This is a lop-sided. skew-whiff reality.

In fact The Piano Accident is to be the portrait of an (accidental) artist – although the term ‘artist’ itself will be expressly called into question. For as Magalie Moreau (Adèle Exarchopoulos) – her right arm in a cast and sling and her neck in a brace – is spirited away from the scene of the accident first by helicopter, and then in a car driven by her loyal, long-suffering PA Patrick Balandras (Jérôme Commandeur), we are being slowly introduced to one of cinema’s more irritant, exasperating characters, and are unsure what to make of her. Magalie is petulant and pampered, entitled and indulged in a way that only someone as superrich as shew is can get away with. Still sporting, as an adult, the braces in her teeth that she wore when she first found fame at age 14 (played by Morena Gosset), Magalie is arrested in other ways – a spoilt kidult whom Patrick must handle like a wayward daughter, even as all his time spent with her is estranging him from his own actual wife (Georgia Scalliet) and children.

Utterly self-centred and extremely rude, Magalie is both insufferable and, thanks to a congenital insensitivity to pain, incapable herself of suffering. Her giggling nervous tic, her absolute self-belief, her quick judgement of others, her often ludicrous inferences, her selfishness and lack of empathy, her simultaneous dissatisfaction with, and indifference towards, seemingly everything, her shallowness and emptiness, her emotional volatility and physical (near) invulnerability, make her a bundle of frustrating contradictions – and these will be teased out in the film’s second chapter by the journalist Simone Herzog (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose exclusive interview with Magalie, opportunistically obtained in a somewhat underhanded manner, will also prove to be a dialectic on the antithetical, irreconcilable, often incomprehensible elements that make an artist tick.

Born, as Simone points out, on the day “when the Internet was first made accessible to the general public”, young Magalie would be inspired by MTV’s Jackass to make her own self-harming stunt videos, which would eventually go viral and make her an online sensation – not unlike Dupieux himself at the turn of the millennium with his Stéphane and Flat Eric videos. What Simone tries – and fails – to pin down, is why Magalie does what she does. Magalie may be incapable of feeling pain, but she also appears to derive no pleasure from her work, or from anything besides sleep. She is too removed from, and contemptuous of, her fanbase for celebrity to be her motivation, and she has already made more money than she could ever hope to spend. “What if”, asks Magalie of her drive to keep creating videos, “there was no reason?”. This expressly echoes the “no reason” cited by Lieutenant Chad (Stephen Spinella) as “that most powerful element of style”, in the prologue to Rubber (2010) – often regarded as Dupieux’s own (meta)cinematic manifesto. Magalie is, of course, like Dupieux himself, both a filmmaker and something of an outsider artist.

“I don’t pretend to be a good person,” Magalie says later. “I embrace all the horror inside me”. Sure enough, part of Dupieux’s portrait of the artist is to show Magalie warts and all, including her dark and ’crazy’ side. This side of her is artfully illustrated in the blown-up photograph – showing her holding up a knife with a manic grin on her face – which is prominently mounted on the wall of her chalet, even if that same, clearly deranged image elicits a purely erotic response from one of her stalker fans (Karim Leklou). This aspect of Magalie is thoroughly explored in the film’s third part, where she shifts from common or garden variety narcissism to out-and-out psychopathy, all as a build-up to her latest and possibly last video. Yet this absurdist film, veering wildly in tone and mood even as it unpredictably tracks its protagonist’s instability, captures not only a creative woman’s slow, committed path to self-destruction, but also hints at the power of art to cheat death, even to immortalise the artist. For anything – be it a misused pianoforte, a burnt and broken body, or a bird shattered on a car’s windscreen – can be revived and reappropriated by the magic of cinema, so that Magalie’s tragic descent is also Dupieux’s triumph, allowing The Piano Accident to take wing.

The Piano Accident just premiered at MOTELX.