Film Review: Adèle Haenel and Jean Dujardin in ‘Deerskin’
(Greenwich Entertainment)
It begins with the kernel of an idea. Like literally let us say for our argument’s sake an actual kernel. A popcorn kernel. What if, instead of paper and metal, we used popcorn kernels for currency? Would they be worth more popped or un-popped? Would movie theaters then become our banking institutions? Picture foiled Jiffy Pop containers piled up like gold bars in Fort Knox, high to the ceilings of the local multiplex. Is butter change? Salt cubes doubloons? Anything’s possible in this brave new popcorn kernel world.
That’s the sort of childlike imaginarium you feel steeped in whenever you step into one of the films of French director Quentin Dupieux — a place where car-tires hunt people for sport and TV sets use radio waves to explode us from the inside, just because he thought that first kernel up and went step by outlandish step from there. And now, thanks to his latest miniature wonder of a movie called Deerskin, we will enter a place where Oscar-winning actor Jean Dujardin becomes fixated on stealing all of the jackets in the world so that his own jacket, made of yeah you guessed it, becomes the only most fabulous coat in all of the land. Watch out, Joseph — The Artist is coming for all of your Technicolor Dreams!
I know it’s a bit of an easy gag, perhaps not a friendly, on the face anyway, one either, to say that one of your favorite things about a movie was its runtime was short. But I also feel like, at this point, Dupieux knows right where I’m coming from — all of his movies introduce their central goofy conceit, play it out to its absurd illogical and always delightful conclusion, and never once overstay their welcome. Deerskin gives us 75 straight minutes of exquisite ridiculousness, and then exits stage left leaving me wanting just enough more, and not a whit less.
Deerskin will be available On Demand Friday, May 1, screening online at virtual theaters around the country — you can click here and see if it’s playing at one of the virtual cinemas near you.
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