Deerskin | Little White Lies

Deer­skin

15 Jul 2021 / Released: 16 Jul 2021

Two men in a room, one wearing a fringe jacket.
Two men in a room, one wearing a fringe jacket.
3

Anticipation.

Could this be the time that eccentric French director Quentin Dupieux strikes gold?

2

Enjoyment.

Nah. Some consequence-free larks in a film that’s almost aggressively shallow.

2

In Retrospect.

Everyone looks like they’re having fun, which is more than can be said for me.

Jean Dujardin becomes dan­ger­ous­ly obsessed with a deer­skin jack­et in Quentin Dupieux’s slighter-than-slight comedy.

Pro­lif­ic French genre film­mak­er Quentin Dupieux is one of cinema’s quin­tes­sen­tial almost-but-not-quite’ tal­ents. On paper, his films always sound lip-smack­ing: A killer tyre is on the loose!; A retro cop com­e­dy!; A film­mak­er has 48 hours to find a real­is­tic groan­ing sound to secure fund­ing for his movie!

Yet they rarely man­age to tran­scend their log­line. Deer­skin is no dif­fer­ent, a dead­pan para­ble about extreme emo­tion­al detach­ment in which nar­cis­sis­tic and com­i­cal­ly deranged drifter Georges (Jean Dujardin) falls under the spell of a tassled tan jack­et and descends on to a mur­der spree so he can claim to be the own­er of the world’s best jacket.

A local bar­maid with po-faced film­mak­ing aspi­ra­tions (Adèle Haenel) unknow­ing­ly assists with Georges’ crim­i­nal endeav­ours by edit­ing ama­teur DV doc­u­men­tary footage of his crimes. Tonal­ly, the film is a mess, as you don’t have the thrills of a slash­er movie or the laughs of an all-out comedy.

The cast are clear­ly com­mit­ted to Dupieux’s vision, but that vision seems to involve lots of groan-wor­thy plot twists that always come across as thin mate­r­i­al being ham­mered out fur­ther, and nev­er like the sat­is­fy­ing devel­op­ment of a cred­i­ble idea.

Sure, there’s a few grotesque laffs to be had along the way, but when this 77-minute, pur­pose- free film ends, it leaves no last­ing impres­sion whatsoever.

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