Deerskin Wears Its Mystery Well
Christianity counts the following among the signs of the Apocalypse: Death saddling up a pale horse, stars plummeting from the sky, kings hiding under rocks, and seven angels making a racket on their trumpets. “Quentin Dupieux making an accessible film” doesn’t show up in the Book of Revelations, but lo, death abounds all the world over, an asteroid 1.5 miles wide recently hurtled by Earth, and Dupieux’s latest bizarro ode to cinema, Deerskin, is screening virtually while the angelic host’s brass remains silent. John of Patmos got it all wrong.
Out of context, “accessible Dupieux” is oxymoronic, like “jumbo shrimp,” “bittersweet,” and “compassionate conservative,” but Deerskin, though every bit as strange as is to be expected from the Parisian DJ-cum-electronic musician-cum-filmmaker, makes sense without undercutting the qualities that define Dupieux’s body of work. It’s entirely unlike every other movie presently enjoying a last-minute VOD release, being a well-made, proudly weird, genre-agnostic commentary on themes ranging from middle age male vanity to navel-gazing, self-obsessed independent cinema. Unlike Dupieux’s prior work, à la Rubber, Wrong and Reality, Deerskin’s determination to explain itself as little as possible is complemented by its internal logic. The delight the film takes in the script’s eccentricities is inviting rather than alienating.
Anchoring that abundance of quirk is Jean Dujardin, playing Georges, a man who at the start of Deerskin sacrifices everything—his savings, and so it seems his marriage—to purchase a vintage deerskin jacket from an old hermit (Albert Delpy) in a sleepy hamlet in the Alps. Georges likes the way he looks; he’s infatuated with his reflection, and over the course of the movie he replaces every piece of his wardrobe with all things deerskin. Pants. Boots. Hat. But merely bedecking his body in leathery style isn’t enough. His fixation escalates. The camera the hermit tossed him as a freebie becomes a tool of domination as Georges goes about gulling strangers into handing their own coats over to him under the guise of shooting a movie.