Events
Dheepan wins Palme d'Or in Cannes
French director of A Prophet and Rust and Bone, Jacques Audiard, won
the 68th Cannes film festival's biggest prize for a drama about a group
of former Tamil Tigers pretending to be a family to gain French asylum
Audiard has made his name, in films such as A Prophet, Rust & Bone
and The Beat That My Heart Skipped, for a kind of ecstatic violence of
the soul. Dheepan, his film about a former Tamil Tiger fighter looking
for a new life in France, certainly has some of the director's trademark
ferocity, especially in its final minutes, but it displays what can only
described as dialled-down Audiard. Indeed, much of the time it even
ambles, peacefully, with nothing much happening.
It
begins with a short sequence in Sri Lanka: the civil war is over, the
Liberation Tigers are burning their dead comrades' bodies and swapping
fatigues for civilian clothes to try and melt into the general
population. In a refugee camp, a young woman is looking for
unaccompanied children: not for anything as gruesome as sex-trafficking
or slavery, we discover, but to be part of a hastily thrown together
fake family, to help one such fighter get clear of the battle zone and
into Europe. The three of them, strangers to each other, eventually find
themselves in France, and we watch them attempting to adapt to the
precarious new reality: negotiating their way through an immigration
hearing, peddling tat on the pavements, scattering at the inevitable
shout of "les flics!"
The man, going by the name Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan),
eventually gets a job as a caretaker, and the trio make their way to a
rundown housing estate; a recently abandoned flat is opened up and given
to them to make their home. New codes must again be learned, and new
negotiations made - particularly with the twitchy-looking gang who
control the local drugs trade, and who take over one of the nearby
blocks each morning. Dheepan's role as a caretaker gives him a pass, and
he and his compatriots settle cautiously into their new life, at the
roughest end of France's social scale.
The kid, Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), starts school, and
Dheepan's "wife" Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) gets a job too, cooking
and cleaning for a man called Habib, evidently suffering from dementia.
(Even here, though, the paranormality is in evidence: the senior figures
in the downstairs drug gang have taken over Habib's sitting room as a
sort of office-cum-R&R space.) Through the mundane business of living,
the three edge towards intimacy, even approximating in actuality the
family they are pretending to be.
The arrival of a recently released prisoner, Brahim (Vincent Rottiers)
about halfway into the film, triggers a dramatic change. Reclaiming
leadership of the gang, his presence infuses events with a sort of
trigger-happy nervousness. Yalini conceives a wordless, terrified
infatuation for him; but more dramatically is the subliminal effect on
Dheepan. Increased tension with the gang results in a fight, and a
stand-off; Dheepan reacts to the threat by returning to guerrilla mode,
the psychological faultlines of PTSD clearly visible.
In some ways, this material is not unfamiliar, but Audiard possesses
a lyricism that makes his film stand out, even in the final bloody
confrontation. Dheepan is as interested in the accretion of detail, and
thereby understanding what makes a family unit work, as in the rituals
of street combat - though, as he's shown in the past, Audiard is very
good at that too. This may not be the director's most immediately
electrifying film, but in its understated way, it's an immensely
powerful work.
- Guardian UK |