Butler's Cinema Scene

Jean Dujardin

“DEERSKIN” My rating: B

77 minutes | No MPAA rating

When we first encounter Georges,  the protagonist of Quentin Dupleux’s deliciously nasty “Deerskin,” he looks like a college professor…crisp shirt, salt-and-pepper beard,  brown corduroy sports coat.

Georges (Jean Dujardin, the Oscar-winning star of  “The Artist”)  is driving to the French Alps in response to a personal ad. The object of his quest is a vintage deerskin jacket bedecked with fringe; the aging hippy who is selling it tosses in an almost-new camcorder for free.

Georges’ nice corduroy jacket goes in the trash (more precisely, he stuffs it down the toilet in a highway rest stop).  You see, Georges’ life is falling apart — his wife has left him and his credit card has been cancelled — and so he is pouring all his attention into the deerskin jacket; he cannot pass a reflecting surface without admiring his new look, often wiggling his shoulders to make the fringe fly.

“Killer style,” he proclaims.

In truth, the jacket is all wrong for him.  Georges is about three inches too tall and 30 pounds too heavy to make it work; there’s a good two inches of shirt visible between the bottom of the jacket and the waist of his slacks.

But he is a man possessed. He takes up residence in a rustic inn and mans a barstool at the local tavern where he is sure that everyone is envious of his jacket.

Denise the barmaid (Adele Haenel, of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) is unimpressed by Georges’ sartorial efforts but is intrigued by the camcorder.  When he tries to pass himself off as an experimental filmmaker, she volunteers to edit his footage.

Jean Dujardin, Adele Haenel

A deadpan descent into madness, “Deerskin” finds Georges carrying on two-sided conversations with his jacket (“I think we make a nice team”).  Thing is, the jacket asserts that it wants to be the only jacket in the world, which means that Georges has the not inconsiderable task of collecting and destroying the outerwear of often uncooperative citizens.

He imposes his will with a homemade machete fashioned from a ceiling fan blade and begins a film record of his quest.

Denise is thrilled by the footage she’s given to work with (she assumes that Georges is doing some sort of deconstruction of crime movies and that the blood is all special effects).  At one point she describes how as an experiment she re-edited the time-shuffled scenes in “Pulp Fiction” into a straight chronological narrative.  The new linear “Pulp Fiction,” she confesses, “really sucks.”

“Deerskin” isn’t so much laugh-out-loud funny as disturbingly creepy. In attitude it bears a strong resemblance to “Man Bites Dog,” the 1992 Belgian mockumentary in which documentary filmmakers follow a serial killer and ends up helping him dispose of the bodies.

Dupleux has a bleak sense of humor; the good news is that with a terse running time of only 77 minutes “Deerskin” wraps everything up before wearing out its welcome.

| Robert W. Butler