Monthly Archives: July 2021

  • Deerskin

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le daim

    Quentin Dupieux (2019)

    Forty-something Georges (Jean Dujardin), whose marriage has recently ended, holes up in a village in the Pyrenees.  This is after he’s deposited his jacket in a garage toilet bowl and parted with north of €7,500 for a replacement – a secondhand deerskin fringed number.  The elderly vendor, Monsieur B (Albert Delpy), throws in an old video camera, though Georges has no use for this, or didn’t think he had.   No sooner has he booked into a hotel – now completely out of cash, he uses his wedding ring to pay a deposit – than Georges introduces himself to two women in the bar as a film-maker.  Both are interested to hear it.  Barmaid Denise (Adèle Haenel) is into amateur film editing.  The other woman (Marie Bunel) is a prostitute who likes the idea of appearing in a porn movie.  Georges is angry that she assumes this is the kind of movie-maker he is, angrier still when he discovers next day that his estranged wife has blocked his access to their bank account.

    Georges decides to tour the village persuading locals to be filmed, each of them making the same solemn renunciation – ‘I promise never to wear a jacket again as long as I live’.  Some even hand their jacket over to the man with the camera.  At the same time, he cultivates a close relationship with his deerskin:  he talks to it and the jacket, thanks to Georges’ primitive ventriloquism, talks back.  Fantasising that he’s the only person in the world to own a jacket, Georges gradually extends his wardrobe.  The hotel receptionist (Laurent Nicolas) commits suicide, wearing a deerskin hat that Georges relieves him of.  Denise, so impressed by the footage Georges is shooting that she offers to finance his project, with funds obtained from her father, buys Georges a pair of suede trousers to match the jacket.  Deerskin gloves eventually follow.  He also stockpiles the garments relinquished by the villagers.  When, one cold night, a passer-by refuses to part with his jacket, Georges kills him.   He then resolves to do the same to others who vowed to dispense with a jacket but didn’t give it to him.  The murder weapon is a ceiling fan blade that Georges has sharpened.  The results are repeatedly gory.

    Increasingly demanding, Denise wants more images from Georges and, in time, to take over as his film’s producer.  This comes as a relief to him.  After he’s driven them up a mountain road, Georges hands the camera to Denise so that she can capture him in all his deerskin glory.  (A herd of fallow deer in the background is an eleventh-hour reminder of who he has to thank for that.)  As he’s posing, someone really does shoot Georges, and fatally.  The gunman is the father of a mute teenager who, near the start of the story, annoyed Georges by watching him film other villagers; Georges threw a stone at the boy, cutting his face.  Denise retrieves the deerskin jacket from Georges’ corpse, and carries on filming.

    As might have been predicted, Quentin Dupieux’s black-comedy horror film has been admired as absurdist, gloriously bonkers, and so on.  Whatever else it may be, Deerskin is, for sure, remarkably pleased with itself.   Its witty leads do their best to resist the smothering smugness of the script and direction.  Jean Dujardin is clearly up for portraying a man losing his mind with more penetration than Dupieux is interested in getting from him.  (The very first scene, when Georges gets rid of his jacket in the garage loo, is perhaps the strongest in the whole film.  His attempt to flush the garment down the toilet is ludicrous but Dujardin conveys a desperate strength of purpose that transcends the silliness.)  Adèle Haenel’s fluent, matter-of-fact credibility keeps her playing of Denise mercifully straight.  Her and Dujardin’s skills can only be small mercies, though.  The writer-director is unquestionably the dominant presence, and a smug and shallow one.  This is epitomised by the emerging look of the film.  As Georges’ preoccupation with his ginger-coloured deerskin grows, a little of its colour seeps into the visuals, making the whole world beige.

    The combination of the items Georges acquires from Monsieur B and the deranged, monomaniacal behaviour that results from owning them might suggest a satire of film-making as an obsessive and potentially amoral tunnel vision.  That doesn’t square, though, with Denise’s accelerating appetite for running the show before she inherits either the camera or the deerskin, neither of which she appears to covet.  You also wonder what happens once the bodies of Georges’ victims are found, and at the complete absence of police, and CCTV, in the vicinity.  This is the beauty, though, of making a movie that’s ‘absurd’ – at least if you’re the kind of wacky brazen showoff Quentin Dupieux appears to be.  You needn’t go to the trouble of making any kind of sense.

    21 July 2021

  • Martin Eden

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pietro Marcello (2019)

    When he gave Upton Sinclair a copy of his 1909 novel Martin Eden, Jack London added an inscription:  ‘One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero).  I must have bungled it, for not a single reviewer has discovered it’.  Martin Eden is, as London was, a working-class autodidact who achieves great commercial success as a writer.  Unlike his creator, Eden rejects socialism in favour of self-assertion and is terminally disillusioned in the process.  Pietro Marcello, who directed and (with Maurizio Braucci) wrote this screen adaptation of London’s novel, is also a socialist.  In interviews about his latest film, Marcello has explained the political motivation behind his work.  He isn’t liable to be frustrated by reviewers as London was – many critics, armed with a press pack, see what they’re told to see.  But Martin Eden as politically clear cut as the man who made it may have intended.  The film is hard to follow in other ways, too.

    Although he retains London’s protagonist’s name and essential identity, Marcello relocates the action from California to Naples.  When the events are taking place is more difficult to say; this vague chronology, at least, looks to be deliberate.  Sets, clothes and other artefacts suggest different decades of the last century; ditto the archive material – some news film, some documentary footage shot by Marcello over the years – which punctuates the narrative.  Marcello told Jonathan Romney in Sight & Sound (Summer 2021) that ‘I wanted to see Martin Eden across the entire 20th century’.

    At the start of the story, Martin (Luca Marinelli), a brawny sailor, saves Arturo (Giustiniano Alti), puny scion of the wealthy Orsini family, from a beating.   Martin is invited into the Orsinis’ home, where he falls in love (at first sight) with Arturo’s lovely sister Elena (Jessica Cressy).  Some time later, but before he’s a successful writer, Martin, at one of the Orsinis’ soirees, accepts a mocking challenge to hold the palm of his hand over a candle flame for as long as he can.  Doing so, he recites apt lines of poetry, from the penultimate section of ‘Little Gidding’:

    ‘Who then devised the torment? Love.
    Love is the unfamiliar Name
    Behind the hands that wove
    The intolerable shirt of flame
    Which human power cannot remove.

    We only live, only suspire
    Consumed by either fire or fire.’

    Afterwards, Martin meets a fellow guest, Russ Brissenden (Carlo Cecchi), the ailing but charismatic socialist writer who will become (up to a point) his mentor.  (As will be obvious, this character’s name is also unchanged from London’s original.)  Brissenden regrets that Martin accepted the challenge (‘It was a perfect circus act – they must be still laughing about you’) but compliments him on the ‘nice verses’.  Martin, in response, claims these as his own and that he wrote them for Elena Orsini.  Although Brissenden seems not to know different, Marcello surely expects his audience to.  What we’re therefore supposed to make of Martin’s appropriation of T S Eliot, I’ve no idea.  The implication seems to be that Martin is a fraud but I missed any other suggestion in the film that he’s this kind of fraud, as distinct from someone Marcello sees as politically misguided.

    Like London’s novel, the film ends with the title character’s suicide by drowning.  Marcello has illustrated the effects of time and cynicism on Martin’s physical and spiritual health yet the closing sequence, as he walks into the sea and keeps going until deep water forces him to swim instead, has a grandeur that makes it ambiguous, to say the least.  Martin’s taking the plunge doesn’t seem like a final admission of failure.  His self-destruction, if that’s what it is, has a heroic quality.   It could equally be read as an expression of the creative artist who’s prepared to go further and further to test himself.

    The strong-featured Luca Marinelli magnetises the camera throughout although this too arguably gets in the way of condemning Martin’s individualism.  Viewers are likely to root for him, thanks to a combination of the lead’s presence and the absence of any competitors for our sympathy.  Although Marinelli dominates proceedings, several women in the cast also register.  Jessica Cressy as Elena and Denise Sardisco as Martin’s later partner Margherita are beautiful in strikingly different ways, as well as temperamentally complementary.  Yet it’s two older, plainer actresses who give more memorable performances – Autilia Ranieri, as Martin’s elder sister, and Carmen Pommella, superb as the working-class widow with whose family he lodges while he’s struggling to get published.  Whatever his other faults, Martin is able to admire Maria’s human kindness, and doesn’t forget it.

    10 July 2021

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