Deerskin (Quentin Dupieux, 2019) (Patreon)

I've been on the fence about this guy for a while now. I thought his second film Rubber was a clever bit of deadpan surrealism, and I appreciated that while Dupieux did thoroughly exhaust his premise -- a sentient tire -- the film actually had some other stuff going on in the margins. But then I tried to watch a few others (Wrong, Wrong Cops, Reality) and found them plodding and forced. So I'm happy to be back in the fold because, even when these films don't work, I am theoretically glad they exist. This is the kind of amiable WTFism that cinema needs more of.

Deerskin has a number of specific elements to its credit, one of them being brevity. Clocking in just under 75 minutes, it can't wear out its welcome. And with a genuine star (Jean Dujardin) at its center, Deerskin struts and swaggers like a "real movie," which makes its absurdity less precious and more dryly bracing. The plot progresses (or spirals downward, really) in the only way it can. But this induces nods of affirmation, not disappointment. A bit like watching one of sculptor Jean Tinguely's machines self-destruct.

Georges (Dujardin) has been summarily kicked out of his previous life, for reasons unknown. But it could be due to impulsive behavior and bad decisions. At the start of the film, we see him pay an elderly gentleman (Albert Delpy) 75,000 Euros for a used deerskin jacket. "Sick style!" he exclaims, and becomes duly obsessed with the garment. As a lagniappe, the fellow gives Georges a brand new digital camera absolutely free, and this prompts him to embark on a phony career as a filmmaker that, with the help of a bartender / amateur video editor (Adèle Haenel), becomes something a bit more concrete.

As comically simple as Deerskin is, it is surprisingly Marxist and Freudian. Georges takes the commodity fetish to outlandish extremes, eventually splitting his own consciousness so as to have "conversations" with the jacket. (This reminded me a bit of Mel Gibson and his puppet in Jodie Foster's The Beaver, but Dupieux's direction is cleverer, especially in his use of shot / reverse-shot.) In time, Georges becomes intent or ridding the world of every other jacket, a sign not only of his overvaluation of the love-object, but his crisis of identity in the field of language and representation. 

That's to say, Georges requires the fantasy that he is a singular, wholly original being, and not a repetition of those who have come before, or those who surround him. The proliferation of jackets, which most of us would never notice, becomes an affront. But at the same time, he is slowly becoming clad from head to toe in deerskin, as if he had the capacity to simulate and even replace nature. If that's possible for Georges, then it perhaps proves that however riven the human unconscious may be, the ego is merely skin deep.