Deer­skin – first look review

A for­est green cor­duroy num­ber. Three but­tons by the cuff, tai­lored lapels. Jean Dujardin as rene­gade divor­cé Georges is wear­ing a pret­ty hand­some blaz­er as Quentin Dupieux’s Deer­skin begins. It’s nice, but it’s not good enough – the prize in his eyes is a fringed, fit­ted, 100 per cent deer­skin jack­et. She’s an absolute beau­ty, and she mat­ters more than anything.

“As you can see, it’s not an ordi­nary jack­et,” the sell­er tells Georges. The meet­ing between the jack­et and its new wear­er sets the wheels in motion for a sto­ry of a fetish, of a code­pen­dent rela­tion­ship between an inan­i­mate object and a swell-head­ed man that, like many of the most pas­sion­ate love affairs, can only end in tragedy.

Georges’ liveli­hood depends on the jack­et (which sub­se­quent­ly takes over the rest of his out­fit, with an out­stand­ing head-to-toe 100 per cent suede look) as his iden­ti­ty revolves around a very sim­ple dream: to be the only per­son in the world wear­ing a jack­et. His irra­tional – but nev­er vis­i­bly hys­ter­i­cal – obses­sion inter­sects with a half-heart­ed attempt to become a film­mak­er, when he’s giv­en a handy­cam as a free­bie with his world-shat­ter­ing pur­chase. The hob­by entails meet­ing oth­er peo­ple sport­ing out­er­wear, con­vinc­ing these peo­ple to no longer sport out­er­wear, nav­i­gat­ing the puz­zled reac­tions and thus build­ing a whole bewil­der­ing inter­nal nar­ra­tive around this mission.

And so the sto­ry flits between refrac­tions of sin­cere nar­cis­sism, back and forth between the shaky zooms of Georges’ clue­less cin­e­matog­ra­phy (reveal­ing Dupieux’s inescapable fas­ci­na­tion with the quirks of his own process) and the mag­net­ic stares caught in the reflec­tions of mir­rors and car win­dows. The char­ac­ter seems cut from the same cloth as Jake Gyllenhaal’s unhinged entre­pre­neur Louis Bloom in Night­crawler, while being guid­ed by the inescapable aro­ma of Peter Strickland’s haunt­ed dress in gial­lo romp In Fab­ric.

But Dupieux plays by his own rules, craft­ing an immac­u­late, taut por­trait of pathet­ic navel-gaz­ing mas­culin­i­ty, a study of a man both unaware of and unapolo­getic in his psy­chopa­thy. Deer­skin toys with the damna­tion of its oth­er char­ac­ters too, offer­ing a play­ful turn for Adèle Haenel as gut­sy wait­ress-cum-video edi­tor Denise, boast­ing the actor’s range to extend beyond the solemn roles that have put her on the map so far.

The film is wicked­ly fun­ny with­out a hint of pan­tomim­ic excess, its intel­li­gence feels both hyper­re­al and res­olute­ly dead­pan in turn. Georges admires his killer style, blind­ed by the light of his own sar­to­r­i­al majesty – but then there’s nev­er any escap­ing the irony in the irrepara­ble threat of blood stains on suede. The dan­ger­ous path that Dupieux treads is noth­ing short of delicious.