Written and directed by Quentin Dupieux
Starring Jean Dujardin and Adèle Haenel
Languages: French with subtitles
Running time: 1 hour and 17 minutes
Unrated, but it gets a bit vulgar and violent at times

by Audrey Callerstrom

A missing dog, a groan, a tire. Quentin Dupieux, a French electronic musician turned filmmaker, has made a niche for himself by creating surrealist comedies where an object or an animal is often the focus. His third film, Rubber, was about a sentient car tire named Robert who turns homicidal after learning it (he?) is telekinetic. In Deerskin, the object is a jacket, which Georges (Jean Dujardin, The Artist) acquires from an old man. Georges has been figuratively castrated – his wife has kicked him out and frozen their bank account. How does he get his life back? The answer – he stuffs his stupid, pathetic green corduroy jacket into a gas station toilet and spends all his cash (about $8,500 USD) on a 100% deerskin jacket. It’s not an unattractive jacket- for an animal hide that’s several years old, it’s in good condition, with fringe across the chest. But is it as jaw-dropping at first sight as Georges thinks it is? Not really. It feels a little out of place in modern-day France. But he believes it transforms him, that it gives him what he repeatedly and unironically refers to as “killer style.”

It’s funny watching how people react to Georges. He assumes that everyone is jealous of his jacket. He interrupts a private conversation between two women at a bar, asking if they are whispering about his jacket. “People always talk to me about my jacket.” Snort. Sure they do. Georges takes videos of himself in the jacket, talks to it, says goodnight to it. When he’s not wearing it, he keeps it propped up on a chair. Denise (Adèle Haenel, Portrait of a Lady On Fire) is an aspiring editor and she plays along, eager to edit Georges’s footage into a film. She thinks it has potential, but she wants it to be more sensational. And soon it is, as the power of the jacket starts to take over Georges.

Deerskin is a funny, compact, poignant film that brilliantly carries out its outlandish premise. Denise sees a deep concept behind Georges’s mindless footage. Meanwhile, Georges is a complete doofus, stumbling over his lies and mistakenly referring to Denise at one point as a “creditor.” What unfolds with the jacket and Georges’s film in the making is fascinating. I will say that it involves murders and a seemingly innocuous household object. As gory as it gets, is this a horror film? No. The premise is ultimately so silly that each murder is met with a jump and a giggle. It’s giddy but not self-satisfied with its premise, never winking at the audience like it’s aware of how absurd it is. The score is minimalist – peculiar, ominous horns are used sparingly. Deerskin would have made an effective and funny short film, but then it would have been removed from its clever conclusion. A longer film (Deerskin runs a tight 77 minutes) would have incorporated a B story or an unnecessary character that would have dragged the film down. Deerskin examines vanity, materialism, film, art and also has a scene where someone uses their mouth to remove a wedding ring from a corpse. Like Denise tells Georges after reviewing the footage, “It’s wild. I’m into it.”

Deerskin is available to rent or buy, digitally, on all the major platforms or you can buy the DVD direct from Kino Lorber, or wherever you get your physical media.