77 min | NR | March 20, 2020 | Greenwich Entertainment
A broke man blows his savings on a fringed deerskin jacket and decides it should be the only jacket left in the world. Quentin Dupieux turns that joke into a deadpan story about ego, delusion, and a guy who would rather be a filmmaker than a person. Jean Dujardin plays it dead straight, which is exactly why it works.
Georges arrives in a remote French village with most of his money gone and one purchase to show for it. He has bought a fringed deerskin jacket and fallen completely in love with it. The jacket talks back to him. It wants to be the only jacket left on Earth, and Georges agrees to make that happen. Quentin Dupieux builds the film around that delusion and lets it curdle into something violent. This is a movie about a man who pours himself into an object and calls the emptiness a calling.
Jean Dujardin plays Georges with a straight face that never cracks, even as the man’s reasoning collapses. He treats the jacket as a colleague and a confidant, and he protects his dignity while shedding every piece of it. Adèle Haenel plays Denise, a small-town bartender who edits film as a hobby and believes Georges is the real director he pretends to be. Haenel gives Denise a sharp, hungry competence that makes her the only person in the film with actual talent. Albert Delpy plays Monsieur B., the seller who hands Georges the jacket and a camcorder and sets the whole spiral in motion. Dujardin and Haenel build a partnership that runs on mutual delusion, and the comedy comes from how sincerely they both commit to it.
Dupieux writes and directs, and he frames the alpine village in flat natural light that drains the location of any romance. The film keeps cutting to Georges’s own camcorder footage, and the degraded video sits inside the clean image like a confession. The edit delivers violence without buildup, dropping the gore into the frame between two deadpan beats. The sound design treats the jacket’s voice as plain dialogue, with no effect or reverb to mark it as fantasy. The production keeps everything spare, and the cheap motel rooms and empty bars strip the world down until the thinness itself becomes the joke.
The conceit is slight, and the film knows it. Dupieux is not hiding the fact that a killer jacket cannot carry a feature on its own. So he turns the obsession into a story about cinema, about a man who wants to be a filmmaker and will hurt people to feel like one. Georges has no vision and no money and no skill, and he picks up a camera anyway. The film finds that hunger funny and sad and quietly frightening, and it never reaches for more than it can hold. That restraint is the point, and it is also the limit.