French director Jacques Audiard does things his own way: his latest film stars previously unknown leads from Sri Lanka and India, and is almost entirely in the Tamil language. Its boldness and its political will to shake up the introversion of the French film world were no doubt factors in its winning last year’s Palme d’Or in Cannes. It’s about a family of immigrants newly arrived in France – only they’re really strangers huddling under a flag of convenience to leave Sri Lanka and find a new life. Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) is a woman who enlists a young girl to play her daughter, while “husband” Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) is a militant with the recently defeated Tamil Tigers (the story is set in 2009). French social services billet them in a dilapidated banlieue estate, where Dheepan works as a caretaker – and where a drug war is about to erupt.
The film is superbly acted by its central trio – with Srinivasan, a stage actor from Chennai, especially putting her stamp on the film. Dheepan is most insightful and poignant when it captures Yalini’s predicament as a woman unable to be maternal towards her supposed daughter (a very affecting Claudine Vinasithamby). Srinivasan is terrific, subtly revealing layer after layer of Yalini’s personality as she tentatively bonds with gang boss Brahim – unsettlingly played by French screen regular Vincent Rottiers, here resembling a weasly Edward Norton.
As Dheepan, Antonythasan – in real life a novelist – is a more taciturn presence than Srinivasan, but equally impressive. Overall, the Audiard touch is unmistakable: grittily photographed by Éponine Momenceau (making an astonishingly confident feature debut), the film characteristically evokes a deep-textured universe of dirt, debris and squalor. But the abrasive realism is tempered with dream-like images, such as the scene in which Dheepan, out peddling tawdry knick-knacks, emerges from darkness wearing luminous bunny ears.
The film is utterly credible and gripping – until the climax, where Audiard and co-writers Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré take a disorienting left turn. They seem to have mislaid 20 pages of script, with social realism abruptly turning into a guns-and-machetes vigilante thriller, and Dheepan into a Charles Bronson-like avenger. You’ll emerge shrugging with bitter frustration, but when Dheepan is good, it’s very good. It at least 80% deserves its Palme.
