French filmmaker Jacques Audiard has premiered his latest, Dheepan, at the Cannes Film Festival. Here’s Jordan Farley’s reaction…
Following the two most celebrated films of his career – A Prophet and Rust And Bone – could not have been easy, but Jacques Audiard’s remarkable run continues with Dheepan. It’s an unusual hybrid – part intimate immigrant drama, part suburban thriller, with the emphasis emphatically on social realism for the bulk of its runtime. It shouldn’t work, but it soars under Audiard’s supervision.
All three are superb, particularly Antonythasan – a quiet man with explosive rage bubbling just beneath the surface. For the most part he’s muted and subdued, even in conversation with his countrymen, clearly suffering from PTSD. He lets his demons out in a series of nightmarish sequences, screaming Tamil chants at the top of his voice while getting wasted in a darkly lit basement, and is chillingly efficient when the violence does eventually erupt. He’d make a great Terminator.
The film is careful and considered in its approach to the ever-growing but fragile connection between the family, hopeful that maybe something beautiful can spring from this unlikely alliance. As time goes on people start to admire Dheepan for the good work he does around the building, which is routinely trashed by the drug dealers; Yalini earns the respect of Brahim, who appreciates the care she gives his father; and Illayaal races ahead at school. But unlike the blossoming bond between the family it’s clear there’s no future for the trio in this place – they’ve simply traded one unstable warzone for another.
Dheepan’s niftiest trick is successfully walking an extremely treacherous tightrope between social-realist drama and action thriller. Dheepan wants nothing more than to put war behind him but violence is something he just can’t seem to escape. In one oddly isolated scene a former colonel of Dheepan’s turns up in the apartment block requesting Dheepan help raise a ludicrous sum of money to send guns back to the Tigers. It’s a scene that comes out of nowhere and is never referenced again making it unclear whether it’s reality or Dheepan’s mind playing tricks.
The film’s final 10 minutes will either enthral or completely alienate given what’s come before, and a cheesy coda is entirely unnecessary, but Dheepan is an impressive and unusual genre mishmash, magnificently executed by Audiard. It’s not his best work, but stands as a strong entry in this year’s festival.
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