Deerskin

Here's a nice little oddity. The fella behind Mr. Oizo's Flat Beat from 1999 has turned out a wacky, violent, comic farce, starring the Oscar-winning Jean Dujardin and the excellent Adele Haenel (from Portrait of a Lady on Fire). Mr. Oizo (or Quentin Dupieux, if you prefer) isn't new to the caper, with a few feature credits to his name, but I wonder if making Dujardin's Georges a novice filmmaker wasn't a bit of a slyly autobiographical flourish.

Deerskin is a warped tale of the very male rejection coping mechanisms of exceptionalism and brutality. Dujardin plays Georges as a post-football Eric Cantona physically, and the 'kung-fu', 'seagulls after the trawler' Cantona emotionally. Put simply, he's beardy, violent and prone to philosophical bullshitting. He stays on in a small Alpine town after buying an expensive deerskin jacket, which becomes the third lead of the film. I admit to knowing sod all about fashion, but this jacket he adores looks a little short to me, sexy tassels and straps notwithstanding.



This is heaving with 'what the fuck' moments, but I think you know where it's going when Georges has to suck his ring off the finger of a corpse. The mundane yet surreal conversations between Georges and the jacket make the ensuing antics understandable in hindsight and the reasonably abrupt ending works perfectly. No messing about searching for an extravagant way to finish (even though the use of the dim kid was a bit brazen).

Other points to note here: there were zero cops in the film by my count, Georges making a mass grave, but not for the bodies has more than a whiff of the macabre to it, and Haenel's Denise is really ambiguous throughout - is she affected by the 'killer style' in the same way as Georges? A must watch for anyone who likes their leather sentient.

Deerskin opens at the Luna Leederville on Thusday August 6th.

See also:

Jerome Boivin's fantastic Baxter (1989) has a malevolent bull terrier as its star and Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread (2017) is a fashion-related gem.

SPOILERS IN POD!!

Listen to "Deerskin" on Spreaker.