CAPSULE: Dheepan (2015, Dir. Jacques Audiard)

This is another one of "those" posts. The ones where I admit to having dozed semi-regularly through some key moments of the film at hand. I'm still going to put something up here because despite being a semi-interested follower of Jacques Audiard's work, and despite Dheepan having taken home the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, it is too confused a film to have me running back for a clarification watch.

Besides, I have it on good authority that I didn't miss all that much, and that the film is actually confusing with or without sleep. Anyway, those of you who were alert throughout can let me know where I've misjudged.

The anchoring component here, possibly the thing that kept me somewhat connected with Dheepan's tenuous narrative progression is that Audiard is mining familiar territory. Trauma, family and brewing conflict scar the screen. A young makeshift family flees the war in Sri Lanka and attempt to make a new life in the crumbling, gang-run outskirts of Paris. There, the three refugees, Dheepan, his "wife" Yalini and "daughter" Illayaal, encounter their own individual struggles, both in their fraught bonding and their lives in foreign world outside their small apartment. Dheepan picks up a job as the housing estate's resident caretaker under the watchful eye of the buildings' "protectors", Yalini as the carer for an old gentleman. The problem is, both their employers hail from different sides of a local battleground, which inevitably flares up inciting memories of their war-torn home.

I forget about Illayaal because the film does too reasonably early on.

There are moments where Dheepan reveals real insight into the refugee experience and the impossibility of leaving behind violent conflict. In fact, Audiard's control within individual scenes impresses. It is his inability to bring those scenes together that undoes his film. As a messy survey, the film's first half is engaging; as it draws to a close though, and the family's positions put them in conflict with each other and with their new home's violent overlords, it all gets incomprehensibly scatty.

Jesuthasan Antonythasan's central performance means Dheepan retains some credibility. It is a brutally committed turn and though the film's unbalanced climax kind of comes out of nowhere (at least the manner in which it tumbles away so completely and so rapidly perplexes), Antonythasan's believable break with reality reverberates. Perhaps not enough to wash away the characters previous missteps quite as thoroughly as Audiard believes it can but enough.

Final thoughts: Unsettling. Confusing.

And that is just the decision to award this the Palme d'Or. There were far more deserving films in the competition.

Perhaps the jury were more awake than I.

★★★

Trailer: