Starring: Jean Dujardin, Adèle Haenel, and Albert Delpy
Distributor: Umbrella Entertainment
Runtime: 77 mins. Reviewed in Jul 2020
| 
| 
This subtitled French film is based on a screenplay that the Director of the movie (Quentin Dujardin) wrote. It tells the story in comic-horror tone of a 44-yr. old man, who becomes obsessed with a designer-made deerskin jacket, and who turns to crime.
Georges (Jean Dujardin) is suffering from a mid-life crisis. He is divorced from his wife, who sees him as someone “who no longer exists”. He feels a failure, wants a new life, and is searching for a new persona. While travelling through France, he stops at a petrol station and unsuccessfully tries to rid himself of the tired-looking jacket that he is wearing. Travelling further into the French country-side, he falls in love with a heavily fringed deerskin jacket that turns out to have special powers. George spends his entire savings on it, and buys it from an elderly, private jacket-seller, Monsieur B. (Albert Delpy). He becomes obsessed with its look, and spends time parading his new jacket in front of a mirror, where he egotistically marvels at the jacket’s “killer style”.
The jacket doesn’t fit Georges all that well, but it exerts an extraordinary influence over him. The film shows us scenes where Georges talks to his jacket, and it talks back to him to persuade him how to think and behave.
Georges eventually sets up residence in a rural village, where he is mistaken by Denise (Adèle Haenel), an attractive local bartender in the town, as an independent film-maker of distinction. Living “on the wild side” and with a passion for film-editing, she is attracted by Georges’ pretence to be an avant-garde film-maker. She and Georges – two lonely people – team up to make a film based on Georges’ deerskin jacket. They make a film about a man who will do anything he can to be the only person left alive to wear the one remaining jacket, and Georges, in film mode, develops the fixation to rid the world of all jackets, except the one he is wearing.
The film is produced in black comedy format and makes dramatic use of horror imagery late in its second half. The film as a whole is presented to the viewer in satirical style. People are killed by Georges, and blood is spilled with impulsive slashing and impaling, and Georges’ escapades propel him deep into madness. The film as a whole is absurdist cinema done darkly, but well.
Jean Dujardin brings dead-pan comic skill to the role of Georges. The plotline of the movie is whimsically thin, but Dujardin, under the direction of Quentin Dupieux, effectively glues the scenes together. Georges starts killing, and Denise eggs him on to outrageous acts. Georges’ mission is a killing rampage with a single goal in mind – to convince others that he has his jacket’s “killing style”. The jacket itself “wants to be the only jacket in the world”, and Georges wants to be “the only person in the world to wear it”.
This is a movie that searches for meaning in comic-horror style, and Quentin Dupieux satisfies the demands of a very distinctive plotline in an original way. It is a highly unusual film about a man drifting into madness who wears an article of clothing that has a mind of its own. The deerskin jacket tells Georges to destroy all other jackets until his is the only one left. This means, of course, that the people in all remaining jackets are dispensable, and Georges does what he sees as necessary. The film is a dark comedy about a man and the jacket he loves where a man wearing “powerful” clothing completely loses touch with reality.
This is a hard-to-type, zany movie, that is very well acted and directed. It is a surrealist movie with a Kafkaesque flavour to it, and its satirical themes are various. The movie tells us in its own way that image-consumed people can be driven to madness by their obsession with clothing; it dramatically demonstrates a middle-aged male searching misguidedly for masculinity thought to have been lost; and it warns against what some people do to protect themselves “against an outside world”. Without a lot of horror footage, the film cleverly sustains a creative force.
Peter W Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
12 Random Films…
