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