The winner of the Palme d’Or may not be revealed until Saturday, but the award for the strangest premise of a film at this year’s Cannes film festival has surely already been claimed. Quentin Dupieux’s black comedy Deerskin stars Jean Dujardin as Georges, a middle-aged divorcee who buys a deerskin jacket and becomes so besotted with it that he sets off on a quest to become the world’s only jacket-wearer. He does so armed with a ceiling fan blade that he has sharpened to a lethal point, bumping off anyone who refuses to relinquish their outerwear.
The film’s director insists that it’s not as peculiar as it sounds. “The movie isn’t that crazy, if you look at it,” suggests Dupieux, from a deckchair on the Cannes beachfront. “The character is the absurd element. The movie is almost like a documentary about this guy being crazy.”
That description, like the film, is a little off. Deerskin, which is playing in the Director’s Fortnight section at Cannes, turns out to be deliciously twisted, a midlife crisis as directed by Chris Morris. Dujardin, who most will associate with his charismatic, Oscar-winning performance in silent-film homage The Artist, is unrecognisable here, a barking, bloated, wide-eyed presence, purring “killer style” at himself in the mirror. That the jacket itself is utterly ghastly – a misshapen frilly number that is at least a size too small for its owner – only adds to his, and the film’s, sense of unhingedness.
Anyone familiar with Dupieux’s work will know that the film is hardly a radical departure for the Parisian-born director. His past efforts have included Rubber, in which a sentient tyre goes about telekinetically making people’s heads explode, and Reality, in which a director is tasked with finding the perfect groan for his latest project.
Even more unlikely than the setups of Dupieux’s films is the career path that has led him to make them. Before becoming a director he was better known as cult techno DJ Mr Oizo. If that moniker doesn’t sound familiar, the name of Mr Oizo’s partner in crime, Flat Eric, surely will. A tatty yellow puppet found by Dupieux in a flea market, Eric went on to star in a series of Levi’s adverts in the late 90s. The ads were hugely popular, rocketing the song that soundtracked them, Oizo’s throbbing Flat Beat, to No 1 in the UK charts.
It was a wild time and Dupieux looks back on it with pride. In the moment, though, he struggled. “I was not super happy with the success,” he says, absent-mindedly stroking his unkempt beard. “Even if I know it’s still part of me and was a good thing for me, to make money and grow, as an artist it was scary. I was not prepared for all of it.”
Still, the experience was crucial in Dupieux finessing his film-making chops. He directed both the music video and the ads themselves, a major moment for someone who had “started when I was 15 making terrible short films, with absolutely no knowledge [of film-making]. For 10 years I was shooting bad things, and then I realised: ‘Oh, I should write some dialogue.’ And then slowly I made some better films.”
Dupieux still DJs (his most recent album as Mr Oizo was released in 2016), but believes he has “more to say with my movies”. He reckons Deerskin is his best one yet, and he’s right – its cinematography (by Dupieux) is richer and its editing (again, Dupieux: the man’s a bit of an autodidact) crisper than in previous films. Where Rubber – the film about the killer tyre – was little more than a series of gory, stylised set pieces, this has shade and subtext, with Georges’ shambling attempts to document his quest via a battered old camcorder serving as a sly nod to Dupieux’s DIY background. (“He reminds me of myself as a kid,” he notes.)
Crucially, the film lands its jokes. At times its resembles Ben Wheatley’s cheerfully psychopathic comedy horror Sightseers in the way it balances out moments of pantomime violence with droll humour, with Adèle Haenel (currently the toast of Cannes thanks to her starring role in the Palme d’Or-tipped Portrait of a Lady on Fire) wonderfully deadpan as the wannabe film-maker drawn into Georges’ futile quest.
“I love dark comedy,” Dupieux says. “I love to make jokes about death. When I hear someone has cancer I’m not the one going: ‘Ah, very sad’, I’m expressing my sadness with a horrible joke. That’s how I fight. Life is tough sometimes. You could suddenly die now and we wouldn’t know why. Maybe you ate something. Or you were in the sun too long.”
There’s a hint of menace in his voice as he begins devising methods of death, and suddenly you can glimpse the slightest hint of his film’s protagonist in him. Dupieux isn’t also partial to a frilly deerskin jacket, is he?
“Kind of,” he laughs. “We chose it for the film because it was special and weird, but since Jean had it on in every scene I’ve grown used to it, and now … I think it’s a great jacket!”
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