If you think that the idea a car tyre going on a psychokinetic rampage blowing up people's heads sounds like a very weird premise for a movie, on the evidence of Quentin Dupieux's Rubber you'd be completely right. Sure enough, as we watch the audience within the film take their positions on a hill and proceed to watch the movie unfold through binoculars, it's clear that we're deep in the territory of filmmaking at its most playfully self-reflexive. An homage to the cinematic phenomenon "no reason" - i.e. that both life and movies are full of incidents which happen for no reason - Rubber is predictably unpredictable. Flitting between nods and winks to movies, from Psycho to stakeout cop films, it also deconstructs the notion of films and their interrelationship between the audience. But this is an altogether lighter approach at postmodern cinema, a far cry from the stern lecture which Michael Haneke imposed on audiences in Funny Games. Cerebral and absurd, Rubber's weirdness lingers long after its silly conclusion.
