Movie Review: After the Bonkers "Deerskin", You'd Kill for This Sweet Jacket Too

Well, here's a weird one for you.

Motivation: it’s not just a great Normani song.

It’s the very engine that drives characters to do things that are worth making movies about. Without it, Andy Dufresne would still be locked up in Shawshank, Katniss Everdeen would have just shrugged when her sister was called for the Hunger Games and Hannibal Lecter would settle for ordering his steak rare at restaurants.

French director Quentin Dupieux, however, would rather not have to convince you that his characters need a reason to do the nutty things they do. His film Rubber—about a tire that suddenly takes it upon itself to go on a killing spree—literally opens with a cop explaining to the camera that movie motivations are arbitrary. And in his latest film, Oscar-winner Jean Dujardin gets his marching orders from a frilly deerskin jacket. In fairness, for fashionable French audiences, that’s motivation enough.

Dujardin, best known outside of France for The Artist, plays Georges, a man who is introduced paying an exorbitant sum for a deerskin jacket—nicknamed The Beast—with no explanation given. He preens cheerfully in front of the mirror adorned in the tan outfit, brimming with self-esteem, even though he is now broke and, as we learn through a phone conversation with his estranged and dismissive wife, reluctantly separated. No matter. He’s got the jacket now, and the jacket has him, eventually talking back (in Georges voice) and sharing its greatest dream: to be the only jacket in the world. What a happy coincidence. Georges wants to be the only person with a jacket. So, he starts stalking an alpine town—where he appears to have fled—separating the locals from their jackets, or, when they’re non-compliant, murdering them with a ceiling fan blade. Why? Because he’s gotta!

Georges gets an unwitting—or not—assistant in Denise (Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Adèle Haenel), a bartender with dreams of becoming an editor. (She resequenced Pulp Fiction for fun, putting it in chronological order, confirming that, yeah, it was better the original way around.) Since Georges has been shooting his de-jacketings on a digital camera, he pretends to be a director and promises her a job if she can fund his "movie", seeing as his "producers" have gone AWOL in Siberia. He follows her to the ATM, takes her money and then gives her the grisly footage. She doesn’t flinch, thinking he’s making a mockumentary about a man using his jacket like a shell to hide from the world. "Should it be about that?" he asks. She replies, "Well, you should know."

Given Dupieux’s blasé attitude towards cohesive logic, any alternative theory we offer would similarly be met with Georges’ compliant, non-committal question: "Should it be about that?" Deerskin, to me, feels like a commentary on neutered men grasping for control in historically and stereotypically masculine fashion—with a cowboy aesthetic; in violence; as an overbearing director—especially when dressed down by capable women. Dujardin’s oscillation between rash violence and vulnerability—as both Georges and the jacket—and Haenel’s wry performance (the secret ingredient to Portrait) seem to support this reading, and I’d argue for it passionately if I didn’t think Dupieux would simply look at me blankly in return. So, why get worked up about it?

No, Dupieux is making a movie on impulse, just as Georges is taking actions he doesn’t fully understand, responding only to the primal urges of his caveman brain as well. The only thing you need to understand or appreciate here is that Dupieux wanted to tell the story of a jacket that compels its owner to kill people, and to that end, has succeeded. Deerskin is a funny (enough) deadpan horror satire that nonetheless barely justifies its suspiciously short 77-minute running time. (It reminded me of the terrible picture Maeby Fünke has to keep cutting down in Arrested Development: "It's the best 52 minutes you'll spend all day!") But when there’s already no reason to a film, there’s definitely no reason for it to overstay its welcome.

3/5

Deerskin is rated MA15+ for strong comedic violence. It arrives in Australian cinemas from 6 August.