George is driving through the French countryside: he throws his velvet jacket into the toilet of a gas station, completely clogging the drain. He has an appointment to buy a 100% pure deerskin jacket made in Italy, used but in excellent condition with perfectly intact fringes. He brings 7,550 euros and receives a video camera as a gift from the private seller.

He starts frequently looking at his reflection in the car windows and recording himself.

He checks into a hotel and books a room for a month, constantly looking at himself in the mirror, hypnotized by the jacket.

He can't withdraw money from the ATM, as his account has been blocked by his wife, who tells him, "You are nowhere, you don't exist anymore," and he throws his phone into the trash.

He offers his wedding ring as collateral for the payment of the hotel room he stays in; in a bar, he meets a waitress, Denise, who will become his professional accomplice. He claims to be a famous director, and the young girl, passionate about editing, offers her collaboration along with her money.

Meanwhile, George receives commands from the jacket and expresses a desire to become the only person in the world to wear that garment.

Denise gives him a pair of 100% deerskin pants as a gift. He finds a 100% deerskin hat in the hands of the deceased hotel porter and buys gloves and boots made of the same material. Now his double skin is complete: Le Daim.

He only needs to achieve his desire/obsession...

He invites people to audition for his film, requiring them to bring all their jackets, deposit them in the trunk of George's car, and repeat the usual mantra:

"I SWEAR I WILL NEVER WEAR A JACKET AGAIN IN MY LIFE."

This marks the beginning of an escalation of violence; George's lucid madness knows no bounds. He uses improbable weapons and grotesque pretexts to achieve his hilarious goal, waiting outside the cinema for customers to finish the genocide of jackets, buried in mass graves.

A psycho-horror with a surprisingly unpredictable ending sees the ultimate sacrifice dedicated to the altar of obsession with enjoyment.

To define Quentin Dupieux, a music producer, musician, and director, as an unconventional artist does not capture the essence of his works, seemingly surreal and extreme, but fundamentally and formally a portrait of a reality that goes beyond its credibility.

The photographic choice, turned to '70s cinema, places the story in an indefinite space-time context, as are the protagonists with their blurred and disturbed characters.

With Deerskin and his previous films, Dupieux forces the viewer to look with incredulous eyes at what, with careful observation, is reality.

Here, George's psychopathology is fulfilled in the sublimation of the self into a commodity and the commodity into an artistic phenomenon.

The jacket represents that surplus value that justifies the surplus enjoyment placed at the service of the world of commodities: the capitalist discourse, as Lacan says, is that machine of enjoyment, implying the absence of law, the absence of repression, the absence of the feeling of the impossible: here everything is possible, everything becomes possible.

George has no limits; he is a headless machine of enjoyment; the new master, the commodity, the jacket, has no human face; George's hyperactivity is intoxication, bulimic mania, cunning of an infernal machine, because the object produced by this enjoyment is not aimed at filling the lack but is aimed at producing a pseudo-lack dedicated to constantly relaunching the demand in a state of permanent hyperactive convulsion.

The voluntary servitude diagnosed by La Boétie has a new skin; it is no longer that of the master-slave dialectic but that of alienated consumption, which becomes an additional duty.

Quentin Dupieux, the Guy Debord of contemporary directing, makes the commodity sensibly supersensible and full of theological whims, an enchanted world where things dominate the living and where humanity is lost precisely where it should find itself.

And so, with the figure of Denise, the deployment becomes metaphysical, so much so that the snuff movie filmed by George's camera is devoured in the editing and sublimated mockingly into art.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice