For all its gruff bluster, the male ego can be a fragile thing. French absurdist director Quentin Dupieux adds a surrealist bent to a midlife crisis in Deerskin, presenting the fixations and compulsions of egocentric masculinity in all its ostentatiously fringed glory. When the aimless, recent divorcee Georges (The Artist’s Jean Dujardin, nearly unrecognizable in a grey beard) cleans out his bank account to purchase a vintage deerskin coat, he feeds his bizarre, insatiable desire for the impossible: to become the only person in the world who can wear a jacket.
Georges goes about this quixotic sartorial quest through manipulative oaths at first, as he tricks people into forfeiting their outerwear while swearing to never don another coat. Before long, he’s taking more drastic actions at the behest of the prized deerskin jacket, which begins speaking to him when he’s not wearing it, in keeping with Dupieux’s penchant for imbuing inanimate objects with sinister intelligence, as he did in his 2010 killer-tire film Rubber. But in his increasingly violent mission to rid the world of all other jacket-wearers, Georges is also egged on by local smalltown barkeep Denise (Adèle Haenel). Locked out of his joint bank accounts, Georges uses a small digital camcorder—which he received as an odd bonus with his jacket purchase—to pose as a filmmaker in order to gain the attention of Denise, who fancies herself adept at editing. She even claims to have created a chronologically linear edit of Pulp Fiction, an effort she admits resulted in rubbish.
Much as he did with Rubber, Dupieux stretches a single weird joke out to feature-length—but barely, as Deerskin clocks in at a brisk 77 minutes. There are hints here of social commentary, as Georges clearly represents the toxicity of many men’s fixations on fulfilling warped desires. The faux-auteur seemingly strings Denise along for the money she’s willing to fork over for his artistic vision, as she joins and subsequently bankrolls the hyperviolent verité project he claims to be working on. Nevertheless, he assembles, piece by piece, a complete deerskin outfit from head to toe, his boasting about his “killer style” serving as a double entendre in this case. And his singular focus on the exclusivity of this particular look, while essentially shooting snuff films in order to achieve those ends, speaks to the penchant for those in the arts to use their talents not for creative expression but as a means to feed other, more lurid appetites.
With a slight (albeit memorably strange) premise, the whole endeavor wouldn’t hold up nearly as well as it does if not for Dujardin’s committed, deadpan portrayal of absurdity. He’s exuded compelling comedic chops since starring in the OSS 117 spy spoof films, often relying on his hammy smile as a punchline. But behind a grizzled beard, he’s perhaps even more amusing as a desperate, psychopathic loner. When Denise questions whether his movie is a bit weird, Georges asserts, “You can’t see it now, but it rocks,” in what feels like a pitch-perfect retort for this offbeat curio. In a way, the project is a form of self-reflection for Dupieux (perhaps better known to some as electronic musician Mr. Oizo), and indeed the film revolves around the type of navel-gazing that ego-driven masculinity is prone to. But Deerskin, perhaps to its credit, avoids delving too deeply into any of its sociocultural themes and ultimately just revels in its peculiar trappings.
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