The French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux, director of the midnight cult movie “Rubber” (about a homicidal car tire) and the ticklishly perverse “Deerskin” (in which Jean Dujardin played a lonely loon obsessed with a vintage fringed suede jacket), is a dada prankster whose work inspires a different sense of anticipation from that of almost any other filmmaker. When you go into a Quentin Dupieux film, it’s with the thought, “WTF is he going to pull this time?” His movies are goofs, larks, stunts, knowingly arch bizarro-world riffs. And I was especially curious about “Full Phil,” because it combines Dupieux’s French surrealist impishness with the American star power of Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson. Would this be Dupieux’s crossover movie? If so, WTF would he pull this time?
It wouldn’t take much for “Full Phil” to be his crossover movie, since the audience for Dupieux (at least in the U.S.) has long been miniscule-to-nonexistent. “Full Phil,” in its full-tilt Dupieux way, is an eminently watchable movie, a theater-of-the-absurd duel of wits between a father and daughter who are on vacation together in Paris (they’ve gone there to mend fences, though the fact is they’re at swords’ points). The film, which Dupieux wrote, shot, edited, and directed, isn’t as good as “Rubber” or “Deerskin.” It’s middle-drawer mishegas — though part of what’s sort of fun about it, and also interesting (even when it gets overdone), is that the director, in this case, is truly coming on like he has something to say.
