Fashion kills in one of Quentin Dupieux's latest absurdist comedies, the loony nightmare that is Deerskin. After blessing moviegoers with the nonsensical sight of a homicidal tire in Rubber, the French director has now imbued a fringed jacket with the power to unravel the human mind and precipitate its wearers into paroxysms of murderous madness. Jean Dujardin's Georges is the victim of such demonic influence, though, at the start, he, like all things in Deerskin, appears unnervingly mundane…
While Dujardin won his Oscar for a performance of outsized expressiveness, he's able to dial back into a more subdued register when needed. The opening salvos of Deerskin demand that the actor denude himself of magnetism and charisma, an anti-movie star performance that serves to make George into an empty vessel. Purchasing a tacky designer deerskin jacket with fringe all over is presented as the move of a man going through some sort of midlife crisis, pathetic in how unspectacular it is, commonplace and almost pitiful.
However, his behavior showcases a robotic rigidity that perturbs. Dupieux and his actor have constructed an opaque token of flesh and bone where transparent human psychology should be. When he abandons his former life and checks himself into a remote hotel right after buying the jacket, Georges' actions come off as unmotivated, maddeningly so. Such mystery is more frustration than an enigma, teasing the viewer with its nonsense as the protagonist's behavior goes from the mundane to the insane at the drop of a hat.
Partway between fetishistic desire and religious devotion, Georges' relationship with the jacket defines his identity. What was once a void with no personality is now filled with sartorial adoration and a bullying insistence on sharing his obsession with others. We've all been in Georges' shoes at some point, loving something with such passion that we need to make others partake in our feeling. Of course, most of us don't pose as independent directors or shoot a snuff film to document our fraying mind, nor do we use ceiling fans to decapitate innocent people.
Like Reynolds Woodcock, Georges wants his beloved garment to be the only one of its kind in the world. His deerskin monstrosity must be the only jacket in existence, twisting his evangelical mission into a one-man crusade against the mediocrity of non-deerskin outerwear and the people foolish enough to own those sartorial horrors. It all feels predestined from the moment the jacket appeared in the picture. This would be a bloody tragedy, a tale of materialism as an eater of worlds and mind fryer, if it weren't so utterly ridiculous. That's not a dig at Dupieux.
The willfully idiosyncratic auteur has established his oddball style over the past few years, conceiving an oeuvre that's equal parts singular and deranged. His movies follow an ineffable dream logic where the rules of the world are dictated by infantile misconceptions of reality. However, there's nothing innocent about such flights of fancy, but a folly that's perpetually on the precipice of destruction. His films are funny due to an absolute lack of reason, their oddness frightens, and there's a tension in the tonal alchemy that doesn't always resolve itself in agreeable ways.
At 77 minutes, while Deerskin doesn't overstay its welcome, the end is rather abrupt, almost arbitrary if it weren't for what it reveals about the film's other main character. In the little village where he ends, Georges becomes friendly with an aspiring film editor, Denise played by Adele Haenel. At first, we might have imagined her as a sane counterpoint to Georges' madness, a tailor-made inversion of him. Dupieux, however, makes sure we know that, in the cosmos of his filmography, sanity is forbidden. Haenel is naturalistic where Dujardin is eerily vacant, but her Denise is just as lost as his Georges.
If you're up for an inane odyssey into Dadaist bloodthirst and the dangers of vintage fashion, Deerskin might just be the perfect film for you. As slight as it often is, the picture's a cruel delight.
Deerskin is now available to stream on all of HBO's streaming platforms. Don't miss it.