Deerskin (2019) (French Language)

Review

77min

Genre:       Comedy, Crime, Horror

Director:     Quentin Dupieux

Cast:         Jean Dujardin, Adèle Haenel, Albert Delpy…and more

Writers:     Quentin Dupieux

-Synopsis-

A curious French man develops an obsession with a brown suede deerskin jacket with its own personality, as he sequesters himself in a small country town and assumes the identity of a makeshift film director, roping in a local barmaid and aspiring editor as he goes about making his morbid cinematic opus and fulfilling a bizarre sartorial manifesto, while gathering all the elements to create a killer look . . . quite literally.

Whether you realise or not, if you’re over the age of twenty-five you’re probably familiar with the work of Quentin Dupieux—better known by his DJ stage name ‘Mr. Oizo’ and a string of late 90s early 2000s electro house hits led by TV commercial favourite “Flat Beat”—but unless you’re an obscure French film enthusiast or a serious cinephile chances are that you don’t know much about his career as a self-styled indie filmmaker. Yet a mere glance at a synopsis for any of his films would quickly reveal a penchant for absurdist black comedy and gory surrealism; like the one about the psychokinetic car tyre which murders people in the Californian desert, or the story of a search for a missing dog in the midst of alternate realities and a man’s mental breakdown.

But now armed with two of the finest on-screen talents working in French cinema today, Dupieux tones down his cinematic idiosyncrasies but sacrifices none of his surrealist vision to create a killer sartorial flick and a serial killer movie like you’ve never seen . . . and gives new meaning to the proverb “clothes make the man”.

Jean Dujardin stars as ‘Georges’, a bizarre single-minded city slicker running from a failed life who turns up at a sleepy rural French mountain village, picking up a life-changing brown suede deerskin jacket and a camcorder which trigger a morbid new direction in his life. Posing as a rather clueless experimental director and roping in willing but equally weird local barmaid and aspiring film editor ‘Denise’ (Adèle Haenel), Georges embarks on a morbid and ideological sartorial quest and a bleak filmmaking odyssey, leaving a comical trail of destruction on his way to completing a small-town snuff film and an unforgettable look.

There’s no doubt that ‘Deerskin’ does more than enough to earn its critical reputation as a “WTF”, “Bats**t Crazy*flick. But those tags don’t do justice to the subtlety and restraint of a film which deliberately never truly ignites or loses the plot, one defined by comedically deadpan dialogue and the matter-of-fact manner of otherwise seemingly normal characters, whose behaviour becomes increasingly bizarre and extreme—without ever really losing their s**t . . . or whatever they had to begin with.

If you see a spiritual and stylistic connection between Dupieux’s previous work and the “Greek Weird Wave”—defined by the films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Athiná-Rachél Tsangári —then ‘Deerskin’ will simply underline it, combining absurdist strands with good old fashioned French surrealism. There are also echoes of hilariously morbid Francophone black comedy ‘Man Bites Dog’, not to mention strong Western motifs in its narrative and style, which includes a soundtrack combining genre specific themes from composer Janko Nilovic with a selection of 70s soul and funk tunes to great effect.

The weirdness of the film’s thin but sufficient plot is easily matched by the peculiarity of its characters, as Adèle Haenel adds to her reputation as one of the most magnetic young French stars working today with a curiously cool and collected turn as Georges’ unflappable unsuspecting conspirator.

The craziness credentials for ‘Deerskin’ are truly established though by Jean Dujardin as the enigmatic Georges himself, as the Oscar-winner laces his performance of a man in middle-aged existential psychological collapse with some distinct Eric Cantona vibes, sprinkled with the odd bit of gory matter-of-fact ultra-violence to give us a comical killer like we haven’t seen in an age. And the performance is rounded off and completed by his bizarre relationship with the film’s other key figure and its titular character—the jacket—a brown suede leather monstrosity which wouldn’t be out of place in ‘Easy Rider’ or a Spaghetti Western, onto which Georges projects his mania while simultaneously feeding from it.

The result of all Quentin Dupieux’s morbid idiosyncrasies and Dujardin’s confounding quirks is a surreal and delightfully droll ode to filmmaking, an amoral concoction which proves both retro and of its time and which somehow leaves you feeling upbeat without feeling the least bit guilty about it—serving up one of the most unique serial killer odysseys and screen mid-life crises in recent film history.

The Bottom Line…

Quentin Dupieux fine-tunes his distinct filmmaking voice and adds new subtlety to his bold and morbid cinematic sensibilities, delivering a short and sweet unforgettable and delightfully deadpan black comedy with the French flair and moral ambiguity to match, taking an Oscar-winning French star to unexpected new corners of the cinematic spectrum . . . and giving new meaning to the phrase “clothes make the man”.

Similar films you may like (Home Video)

The Greasy Strangler (2016)

In small town middle America, a bizarre father-son duo of disco-themed walking tour guides with a penchant for greasy food moonlight as local serial killers, constantly clashing over their personalties and trustworthiness as they engage in romances and indulge in their morbid proclivities, in this quirky surrealist black comedy/horror from Jim Hosking.

Directed by Jim Hosking and starring Michael St. Michaels, Sky Elobar and Elizabeth De Razzo among others.

Comments

comments

Comments are closed.