Deerskin
Directed by: Quentin Dupieux
Written by: Quentin Dupieux
Starring: Jean Dujardin, Adèle Haenel, Albert Delpy, Pierre Gommé, Laurent Nicolas, Coralie Russier, Marie Bunel
Comedy/Horror - 77 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 29 Apr 2020
Written by: Quentin Dupieux
Starring: Jean Dujardin, Adèle Haenel, Albert Delpy, Pierre Gommé, Laurent Nicolas, Coralie Russier, Marie Bunel
Comedy/Horror - 77 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 29 Apr 2020
French writer, director, and all around cinematic provocateur, Quentin Dupieux, is the avant-garde torchbearer for making inanimate objects into characters. Dupieux is most notorious for Rubber, a 2010 film about a homicidal car tire which discovers it has the telekinetic ability to make people’s heads explode. Dupieux is not callous enough to replace the car tire with a vintage, fringed, deerskin jacket which then goes on a murderous rampage, but the jacket holds a sort of psychological power over its new owner, inspiring him to pursue a most outrageous goal to please his new outer wear.
Georges (Jean Dujardin) has crossed over into another mental realm. Either his recent divorce unmoored him from reality or his mental state was finally so far gone, it alienated himself from his old life. We know next to nothing about Georges other than he puts distance between himself and the past and spends an absurd amount of money on a deerskin coat advertised by a country fellow shocked enough a customer would pay so much for an old coat he throws in a new video camera. The audience doesn’t know Georges as a sane, workaday husband and French citizen. We meet him after the breaking point and hold on from there. Deerskin is not a film about why a man descends into madness, but observing his increasingly erratic and violent actions afterward.
Georges (Jean Dujardin) has crossed over into another mental realm. Either his recent divorce unmoored him from reality or his mental state was finally so far gone, it alienated himself from his old life. We know next to nothing about Georges other than he puts distance between himself and the past and spends an absurd amount of money on a deerskin coat advertised by a country fellow shocked enough a customer would pay so much for an old coat he throws in a new video camera. The audience doesn’t know Georges as a sane, workaday husband and French citizen. We meet him after the breaking point and hold on from there. Deerskin is not a film about why a man descends into madness, but observing his increasingly erratic and violent actions afterward.
Georges cannot stop checking himself out in his new attire. He stares at his reflection in the car window, his hotel room mirror, and keeps muttering about his “killer style.” At the local bar, he interjects himself in a conversation between two women by asking if they are talking about his jacket. They were not. Other than fetish worshipping the new jacket, which also propels Georges’s newfound bravado, he has no other plans. His bank account is frozen; therefore, Georges makes outlandish excuses to the town’s business proprietors about his credit card so brash, folks in the village have no choice but to believe him.
Georges befriends a bartender (Adèle Haenel) who is far more impressed with his video camera than his jacket. Lying his way through situations about why he is skulking around in an out-of-the-way Alpine hamlet, Georges pretends he is a filmmaker with producers in Siberia, a script in his head, and a dream. Denise the bartender is sold. She edited Pulp Fiction into proper chronological sequence just to see how it flowed - it sucked. But this is no autumn/spring romance between two lonely souls, do not forget the deerskin jacket is the loudest gravitational force in the room.
Georges talks to the jacket. It talks back to him. The jacket reveals a quest to Georges so outlandish, merely watching Georges try and pull it off is not sad at watching the insane flounder, but gobsmacking, batshit, otherworldly. Mash together a man without a past and a certain future of doom, a girl thrilled with the idea of experimental, guerrilla filmmaking, and a jacket which may or may not be haunted, and Deerskin is a premise which may spellbound your next dinner party. Your table mates’ eyes will grow even larger when you explain how well it comes off. Jean Dujardin is a Best Actor Oscar winner (The Artist) and Adèle Haenel is coming off one of last year’s best films in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. There are no winks or hints they are in this for laughs - the jacket means serious business. At 77 minutes long, Deerskin won’t push your patience. It doesn’t even push the boundaries of good taste, it’s got too much killer style.
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