Starring Louis-José Houde. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

All art is a lie, of course, even if the good stuff tells the kind of truth you only find through fiction. That’s one reason obsessive prevaricators make good story subjects, if not reliable leaders.

Still, the serial-fibber concept hasn’t been that well-handled in movies. Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying and Jim Carrey’s Liar Liar, for example, settled in for premises that never dug much beneath the surface of this most peculiarly human of skills. (Do chameleons lie? That’s for David Attenborough to determine.) When it comes to examining untruth—whether in life, movies, or politics—everyone seems to settle for embarrassment humour rather than enlightenment. Shame over game, you might say.

All of this applies to the antihero of Compulsive Liar, known as Menteur in Quebec, where it was made. But the movie, written by veteran comic director Émile Gaudreault (best-known here for Mambo Italiano) and two others, ratchets up enough manic fun to at least gesture at something deeper.

Louis-José Houde plays Simon, a lightly bearded exec at a Montreal aeronautical company. Simon doesn’t just make up shit to cover his tardiness and inefficiencies—his car is always running out of gas and what’s wrong with those elevators/computers/delivery guys anyway? He also talks smack about everyone he works with, inventing malicious gossip to make himself look good. Of course, how someone like this has kept a senior position is a mystery—unless it’s a dig at SNC-Lavalin and other perennially troubled engineering outfits.

Anyway, you have to accept that premise for the tale to work, and to laugh when his tissue of lies combusts. On the brink of pitching a big contract to a visiting Russian oligarch (yikes), Simon is sent a translator who’s his polar opposite: the skittish woman (playwright turned actor Catherine Chabot) is a compulsive truth-teller, as well as a mitigating love interest, of course. But what really upsets the apple cart is a force field generated by faraway Buddhist monks, upset that his mendacity “threatened the fabric of the universe”. Make sense?

Okay, maybe they’re pushing it a bit to have all his B.S. magically come true, and the film, which also centres on Simon’s tug of war with his resentful brother (Antoine Bertrand), is generally more silly than profound. But I enjoyed how his attempts to set things right only made things worse, and also how his habitual braggadocio paid off in unexpected ways. I mean, those lies turned his boss into an on-the-job drunk and his parents into brutal abusers, but at least now he really does love Duke Ellington and knows the complete works of Tolstoy. Is it true that all happy families are a lie?