Deerskin

Jacket In

Deerskin
aka Le Daim
France 2019
Directed by Quentin Dupieux
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Spoilers in this one.

Deerskin is the latest movie from Quentin Dupieux, the writer/director of the wonderful killer tyre movie Rubber (reviewed here). I’ve been wanting to see whatever his next film would be for quite some time so imagine my surprise when, on looking this one up, I found he’s done a fair few since then. Seriously, the UK is the worst for distributing real movies... instead preferring to just load up the cinemas with superhero theatrics to the exclusion of all else, it seems.

Deerskin stars the wonderful Jean Dujardin as Georges, who we see is a man who is ‘not quite right’ in the opening sequence, when he drives to a roadside service station and attempts to flush his jacket down the toilets there. We then see him drive to an old guy’s home and purchase from him, for an obscenely large amount of money, a well preserved deerskin jacket. It becomes his life and, shortly after Georges checks into a hotel and delays paying for the room by using his gold wedding ring as a security, we realise he has fled his marriage and, also, that he’s been blocked from his joint bank account.

He doesn't care... he’s all about the jacket and he strikes up a friendship with the girl serving drinks at the local bar, before trying out his new digital cam recorder, which was thrown in with the huge amount of money he paid for the jacket. Georges starts talking for the jacket as the power of the jacket consumes his mind and clings to the idea that he’s a filmmaker, making a film about ridding the world of all other jackets other than his precious, deerskin jacket... which is the shared dream of both him and his jacket. The local bar girl, Denise (played by Adèle Haenel), is also an aspiring filmmaker and Georges cons her, at first, into editing his footage. When she comes into some money, in a bizarre moment which I think begs to be ‘read between the frames' as to her own motivation and tenacity, she takes over production and starts telling him what she needs to make the story better. By this point she’s seen the footage as Georges kills people in order to remove their jackets from the world and she spurs him on, as he pulls apart a fan blade in his room, sharpens it up by scraping the sparking object along the road as he drives... and uses it as a machete to kill numerous people who he rids of their jackets, so he can bury them in a hole in the ground, never to be seen again (the jackets, not the people).

And it's a slow burn of a film which had me laughing out loud at a fair few the off kilter moments in the movie. This isn’t as extreme as Rubber but it’s certainly not traditional storytelling, although it does use a standard narrative framework more to get the ideas across. Dujardin is absolutely brilliant as the ‘not quite there’ deranged lead and Adèle Haenel is equally brilliant as the young ‘editor’. The two share some good chemistry on screen and you get the feeling that Denise is the only one safe from Georges particular brand of ‘strange’.

One of the things I loved was an amazing piece of scoring which ran throughout, which I’m guessing was by composer Janko Nilovic, despite there being a fair few needle drops on the soundtrack. The music is just a little overpowering and often slightly inappropriate to the scenes and I’m pretty sure this is deliberate. It sounded exactly like what Godard was doing in films like Contempt (Le Mépris), where the music would deliberately pop you out of the music and tell you something was overly wrong or dramatic when, it obviously wasn’t. So in this, even when Georges does or says something vaguely odd, the music comes in powerfully to comment ostentatiously on the visuals.

Another thing I liked is the subtlety of the way the deerskin jacket takes over George’s mind. At first we just see George talking his words and, when he’s talking for the jacket, the rack focussing is changed so his lips are softened within the shot. This contrasts with much later when Georges is asleep in bed but his voice is calling him as the jacket eventually wakes him up... good stuff and a nice touch.

The film looks clean and though it has its violent moments, it’s mostly done in a ‘matter of fact’ way where it’s being seen through a video camera or with the victims in long shot... although there is one lovely scene played for comic effect where a random woman in her car is stabbed downwards through her head via the roof of the car and Georges goes through the process of stealing her jacket as his makeshift machete holds her in place. It’s about the goriest part of the film but even this moment is not over the top and only a bit of blood seen running down her motionless face is shown.

I’ve seen this movie has had some bizarrely bad reviews and all I can think of is, perhaps, that the subtle, almost minimal style of the film and the way it leisurely unfolds the small details of its story is perhaps a little too much for some of the younger, less patient viewers. This is not to say it’s slow in any way but the pacing is definitely not Hollywood blockbuster mentality so maybe that’s why the movie is getting low score reviews. For myself, I thought Deerskin was great and I’m hoping this one will get a UK Blu Ray release at some point down the line. Easily one of the better films I’ve seen at the cinema this year, for sure.