Timely, explosive refugee thriller in Paris
Print Edition
FRENCH director Jacques Audiard is a curious combination of art-house auteur and genre filmmaker, a brazen showman and gritty naturalist. He makes tender and brutal movies that recast themselves as they twist their way toward unpredictable finales. To suit tales of transformation, he switches genres mid-movie like a character changing wardrobe.
In “Dheepan,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year, he travels from war movie to migrant drama to film noir, adding an atypically happy ending, to boot. Audiard’s restless shifts can be jarring, but the intensity of his film doesn’t waver; the power of “Dheepan” is in its volatility.
It begins in fire. Fleeting scenes capture a burning Sri Lankan village in the bloody, disorienting aftermath of civil war. To gain asylum, a rebel fighter (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) who, having lost his family in the war, cobbles together a pseudo family.
At a refugee camp, he picks a woman, Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and an orphaned 9-year-old girl, Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) to pose as his family. “Dheepan” becomes his new name, taking the identity and passport of a dead man.
Borders change, but the threat of violence merely mutates. Placed in a tenement block in Paris’ banlieues, Dheepan warily eyes the drug-dealing gang members that patrol the apartment building roofs and clog the stairwells.
The film has undeniable political relevance to France’s immigrant policies, but it’s not quite a social issues film.
The movie is deeply invested in understanding the lives of migrants trying to recalibrate on the margins of a foreign society.
Some have been befuddled by its dream-like epilogue. But for Audiard, whose “Rust and Bone” chronicled the revival of a badly injured killer-whale trainer and whose “A Prophet” depicted a small-time criminal’s rise in a prison’s mob, rebirth is a mean and messy business. But it’s also beautiful.
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