Many have previously said French auteur Quentin Dupieux is an acquired taste, and he has never taken that notion as literally as he does in the riotous Full Phil. Turning his chaotic lens onto the Hollywood sheen, Dupieux enlists Woody Harrelson and Kristen Stewart to play the titular Phil and his daughter Madeleine, who travelled to Paris to reconnect after years of estrangement.
This is a big weekend for Phil, so he spares no expense: the two stay in a lavish Parisian suite, the white wooden doors separating the two bedrooms doing little to dissipate the growing tension between them. As the ageing man pleads with his daughter for a little attention and consideration– would it be too much to ask Madeleine doesn’t clog his toilet? – Dupieux starts to amp up his classic surrealist flair, with hotel staff constantly replenishing Madeleine’s food stocks as she gorges on spinach quiches, well-done steaks and intricately refined puff pastry, food piling up on the sides of her small but neverendingly starving mouth.
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As Madeleine eats, it is Phil who feels the repurcussions, fitted with an expanding prosthetic belly as his words go from hesitant to exasperated. It is a simple but effective metaphor for parenthood, a visual representation of how every single thing a child does somehow affects those who brought them into the world – and the moment a child realises the cruel essence of that power, it becomes easy to harness it to patch away festering resentment.
Stewart’s performance expertly manages to bypass the nauseating nature of the ask, the American actress deliciously enunciating each syllable of spiteful retorts while juggling crumbling pies and waving half-eaten chicken legs in the air. Veteran Harrelson is the perfect counterpart as the growingly desperate father, forced into self-restraint by Charlotte Le Bön’s insistent hotel worker, who refuses to let Phil leave her sight once she spots a slight spark of violence coming from him towards his daughter.
The whole affair is interspersed by a film-within-a-film, a spoof of Jack Arnold’s The Creature of the Black Lagoon starring famed comedy duo Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. In this fiction, the two play eccentric scientists who successfully trap a fish-like monster for experimentation after he chomps away at Emma Mackey’s damsel in distress, poking and prodding at his foreign body to try and get at the essence of the creature — much like Phil attempts to do with his elusive, maddeningly stubborn adult daughter.
When Madeleine needs to escape her father’s words, she pops open a portable DVD player, feasting on the twists and turns of the movie with the same gusto she devours a tarte Tatin. It feels fitting that Dupieux resurrected this very creature, made fearsome only when continuously provoked, and whose stiff physiognomy allows him only to focus on what lies ahead. Phil is equally reticent to surrender to fury, but can only look at what was left behind and therefore fails to satiate a very different kind of hunger.
Full Phil unravels as a perfectly pleasant, endlessly entertaining Dupieux offering that mixes the maximalist physical comedy and repetitive gags of films like Rubber and Incredible But True with the softer, surprisingly moving existential musings of Deerskin. If it were not for the increasingly irksome, bordering on the pantomime framing of Stewart’s gorging, this ensemble piece would sit comfortably on the French director’s top shelf. It is not quite there, but it is a wallop of a time nonetheless.
