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France · 2014
1h 32m
Director Guillaume Nicloux
Starring Michel Houellebecq, Mathieu Nicourt, Maxime Lefrançois, Françoise Lebrun
Genre Comedy, Drama
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Notorious French writer Michel Houellebecq was believed kidnapped on September 16, 2011. However, after a flurry of media reports of his abduction, the story goes cold and Houellebecq, famously reclusive, refuses to set the record straight. Now he goes one step further by starring as himself in a film that purports to tell the tale.
Here, absurdity is piled on absurdity for broadly comic effect: The kidnappers seem aimless, Houellebecq is fairly unbothered, and the world is, presumably, unmoved. Scrappy in style and surely improvised, the film is a lightweight literary in-joke, amusing enough.
New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme
The film is hard on the eyes, having been shot in a low-budget style with the ubiquitous digital palette of gray-beige-taupe. Fortunately, it’s also hilarious, full of humor that is understated, wry and dependent on familiarity with interests as wide as Houellebecq’s own.
This is pretty much the opposite of a contemporary American comedy: rather than broad, The Kidnapping of Michel Houllebecq is an exemplary example of narrow.
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
The character of Houellebecq implicitly understands that this is just a transaction, and doesn’t take it personally. It’s too bad that, like so much of the movie, this germ of satire is never developed past the point of premise.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
A divertingly eccentric, often comically absurd movie.
Village Voice by Melissa Anderson
Crucially, all four men, plus the ancillary characters who appear throughout the film, prove to be excellent company, holding forth on literature, Europe's future, inner-ear ailments, and side triceps.
At first, the movie is offbeat enough to be entertaining anyway; but like the title character, it quickly outstays its welcome.
This genuine curio gets surprising mileage from Houellebecq’s deft, self-effacing performance at the center of a lively comic ensemble.
The Hollywood Reporter by Stephen Dalton
An inspired comic thriller.
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