DEERSKIN: WORRY WITH A FRINGE ON TOP

Deer o deer o deer!

DEERSKIN has Academy Award winner Jean Dujardin as recent divorcee, Georges, becoming obsessed with a vintage fringed deerskin jacket that begins to exert an uncanny hold on him. It’s In Fabric gone feral.

We first meet him driving his Audi dressed in a fine corduroy jacket. First impression that he is not the full Euro sees him attempting to flush the jacket down the toilet. Clearly, he is around the S bend.

His first destination is a visit to chap who has a deerskin jacket that he sells to George for practically all the money he has. He throws in a fox paw key ring and a video camera as a bonus.

Dressed in his frontier gear, next stop is a frontier town, a sleepy French alpine village, where he falls into the guise of an independent filmmaker and befriends a trusting bartender and aspiring editor, Denise, played by Adèle Haenel, last seen in the exquisite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Denise becomes his collaborator on a movie that will document George’s descent into insanity.

Caught up in a frenzy of fulfilling her dream of a life in film, Denise feeds George’s deerskin fetish by buying him a matching pair of breeches for his jacket then financing the purchase of a pair of boots and a hat.

It’s a killer style that turns the stylist into a killer, the delusional deerskin fanatic taking orders from his jacket to eradicate the world of all other jackets.
Georges is essentially hijacked by his jacket.

Suave in suede he turns savage with monstrous results. From the deerskin hat on the top of old Georges to the heel of his deerskin boot, George becomes sartorially satanic, apparently and patently possessed by his apparel.

Writer/director Quentin Dupieux delivers one of the loopiest films this year, a companion piece to Peter Strickland’s IN FABRIC, a bespoke example of horror couture, a schmatter splatter, that flirts with schlock but does not descend.

Perturbing, disturbing, but palpably compulsively watchable, DEERSKIN is the study of a worry with a fringe over the top.