Dheep­an – first look review

There’s a self-impor­tant swag­ger to the cin­e­ma of French dar­ling Jacques Audi­ard which I’ve nev­er been able to ful­ly abide. His default mode is gar­ish bom­bast, and his unquench­able lust for recre­ation­al art­ful­ness often leads to cin­e­mat­ic neces­si­ties such as hon­esty and emo­tion get­ting lost in the flash. His pre­vi­ous fea­ture, Rust and Bone, almost felt more like an effects movie than a pur­port­ed­ly inti­mate dra­ma set on the fringes of society.

With his new fea­ture, Dheep­an, it seems like some­one has grabbed him by the vel­vet lapels, dis­pensed a few light slaps to his griz­zled chops, and demand­ed he shape up or ship out. For its first hour, you’d be hard pressed to guess that it was Audi­ard behind the tiller, so unas­sum­ing­ly rig­or­ous is the film’s sense of char­ac­ter and place, and so pleas­ant­ly absent are those for­ma­tive predilec­tions for apro­pos-of-noth­ing cam­era whizz-bangery.

There is, how­ev­er, one admit­ted­ly amaz­ing trick shot ear­ly on where our epony­mous hero (Jesuthasan Antonythasan), hav­ing man­aged to flee from Sri Lan­ka (where he was engaged as a foot sol­dier in the Tamil Tigers) to France, begins a new life sell­ing nov­el­ty trin­kets from a suit­case on a street. All we see is flash­ing blue and red lights on a black back­drop, and it looks as if an aero­plane land­ing at night which, in terms of con­ti­nu­ity, would seem whol­ly log­i­cal. But it’s actu­al­ly the LEDs from plas­tic rab­bit ears worn by a trio of ven­dors who go on to hec­tor din­ers seat­ed at a restau­rant. It’s a rare moment of high style which con­tains a clever punch­line, so on this occa­sion, we’ll let it slide.

Dheep­an is, for the large major­i­ty of its run­time, a sat­is­fy­ing­ly even-hand­ed and non-judg­men­tal explo­ration of the immi­grant expe­ri­ence. It’s not an overt­ly polit­i­cal film, though Audi­ard makes it easy to extrap­o­late the actions of his char­ac­ters and eas­i­ly place them into the cur­rent news agen­da. For the most part, it sets its stall is being remark­ably pro immi­gra­tion, offer­ing rea­son after rea­son why healthy west­ern economies should do their utmost to offer aid peo­ple from more polit­i­cal­ly volatile glob­al ter­ri­to­ries. In fact, it’s not so much offer­ing aid, more offer­ing the means for basic self-empowerment.

Along­side his fake wife Illayaal (Clau­dine Vin­a­sitham­by) and fake daugh­ter Yali­ni (Kalieaswari Srini­vasan), hasti­ly assem­bled to fit the pro­files of a stack of pass­ports whose own­ers have no fur­ther use for them (ie, killed), the ill-matched trio are placed in a grub­by sub­ur­ban hous­ing ten­e­ment which plays host to reg­u­lar bouts of gang-relat­ed gun­play. Yet they get on with the tasks at hand, ​“hus­band” tak­ing on the role of care­tak­er, ​“moth­er” the role of social car­er and ​“daugh­ter” as inquis­i­tive school­girl. There’s a brac­ing hon­esty to the way Audi­ard presents his char­ac­ters as earn­ing the trust of the local com­mu­ni­ty for way they work tire­less­ly to improve lives; ad hominem attacks on race or class are rar­er than might have been expected.

A ner­vous ten­sion is gen­er­at­ed with regard to how long Audi­ard is going to be able to keep all this good work up, how long he’s going to be able to reign in his grandiose ten­den­cies. Yet, as pri­or qual­i­fi­ca­tions may have hint­ed, things do go major­ly down hill in its botched final act. Minor key obser­va­tion is now hulk­ing plot-twists and blood-sprayed shoot-outs, which gives us a chance to see Dheepan’s old self, when he was tor­tur­ing, maim­ing and killing as part of a rebel mili­tia. This doesn’t mere­ly bring with it a cum­ber­some tonal shift, but undoes a lot of the high­ly nuanced and enlight­ened polit­i­cal dis­course from ear­li­er on. It’s dou­bly dis­ap­point­ing because every­thing before it was extreme­ly impres­sive. Let’s hope we see more of Audiard’s new leaf.