If you rang up central casting and requested a stereotypical French intellectual, the famed novelist and poet Michel Houellebecq is surely what you’d get: underfed, beaky, a complainer and chain smoker who barely bothers to ash his cigarettes.

Accordingly, Guillaume Nicloux’s oddball mockumentary has the writer playing himself, the victim of a kidnapping by three well-read tough guys who believe someone somewhere will want to pay big for Houellebecq’s return. That turns out to be just one of their mistakes.

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.