A man is obsessed with owning a late 60s-70s style deerskin jacket. So, he spends about $10,000 to buy one (when it should be free or next to it since no one today wants one) and then spends the rest of the film making up lies as he stays in a small French town.

I was excited to see this film when I attended the Philadelphia Film Festival. After all, I have really enjoyed the other films I've seen starring Jean Dujardin. However, after seeing it, I was left very, very cold. The reason is like some other French films, such as "Buffet Froid", it's an example of Absurdism. Absurdism is really NOT comedy...more just putting bizarre and often disconnected events into a film and provoking a reaction in the audience. I honestly could tell that some folks in the audience LOVED it....and they were laughing at everything....even when it wasn't funny in the least. And, for me, the experiment simply got tiresome after about five minutes. Overall, a joyless, unfunny and dull film....one that some love but the average viewer will be left thinking "What the $%** did I just watch?!".

Jean Dujardin is quite the versatile actor. He is known more for his comedy roles of course, but pulling these things off ... that's quite a feat. Him collaborating with Quentin Dupieux might be the dream come true for quite some people. And it does not dissapoint at all.

This is weird, off beat and quite narcissistic ... Dujardins character is despicable and really wrong on so many accounts that as a viewer you should not feel anything for him ... at all. And yet he draws you in and you do somehow care for him. Or at least you are given the opportunity to do so. This is bloody and mean and tough to describe. Mental to a degree that is beyond normal and yet not the weirdest thing the director has done by far ... it's comedy if you laugh right? Right!

I suppose it's fair to call this a black comedy, but I have to be honest, I didn't laugh once. I was for all intents and purposes, dumbstruck by the sheer absurdity of it all. Having purchased a second hand, fringed deerskin jacket at an exorbitant price, Georges (Jean Dujardin) becomes completely mesmerized by it's 'killer style' and proceeds to reinvent himself after phoning his ex-wife and finding out, in her words, he no longer exists. Almost from the outset, Georges has conversations with his new jacket which in his delirium fevered mind goes both ways. Having received an outmoded video recorder as a bonus from the same man he bought the coat from, Georges begins to fancy himself a filmmaker, and enlists a lonely young woman (Adèle Haenel) with aspirations of becoming a film editor to join him in his movie making adventure. It's not too long into the film that one realizes Georges is an absolute, sociopathic cad, who's willing to lie, cheat and steal to further his cause. Over the course of the story, he adds to his deerskin ensemble with a hat, boots, pants and gloves, while having made a deal with his deerskin that he alone, of all the people on the planet, is worthy of wearing any kind of jacket at all. There follows a deadly turn by the novice film maker, as the movie careens down a long and sinister path that leaves corpses in its wake.

If one is expecting any kind of credibility to the story, you may as well not be bothered. It will occur very quickly to the attentive viewer that as the bodies in this tiny French alpine village begin to pile up, none of them manage to be discovered, even though they're in plain view, some having occurred in broad daylight. Quite cleverly, whether intentional or not, director and cinematographer Quentin Dupieux successfully creates a movie here that almost looks like it was made with Georges hand held camera, particularly in those scenes in which Georges is filming. Transfixed by her editing duties, Denise (Haenel) assumes Georges role at the end of the picture when he falls victim to his own sadistic pursuits.

Safe to say this won't be a picture for everyone. What starts out as a fairly interesting premise devolves into surrealism on a grand scale from the moment Georges puts on his treasured deerskin jacket. Admiring himself ad nauseum, and tempting bystanders to comment on his taste in fashion, I myself was quite puzzled by the fact that Georges didn't even realize that the jacket was about a size too small for him! Fortunately, it was just the right fit for Denise.