Vision, Mystery, and Release in the Reverse Field

Abstract

While working around a basic plot-line of betrayal, Bruno Dumont’s L’il Quinquin references the codes and clichés both of comedy and television crime series by using the serial format to convey the work of a serial killer, and fully exploiting the possibilities for expanding characterization and reduplicating key actions and motifs. Comedy has always been present in Dumont’s work, of course, but only in small doses and only implicitly. If in Humanity the absurdity and burlesque effects were often just plain odd, in L’il Quinquin the laughter is frontal and explicit. It ranges from brutal black humor and caricature to social parody and satire of the police, the Church, science, and the media (long-standing themes in Dumont), and from physical gags and carnivalesque farce to vaudeville grotesquerie. L’il Quinquin swings constantly between the genres of light comedy, murder mystery, social drama, and the study of rural life.