Happy Cannesiversary to "Dheepan"

by Nick Taylor

Hello, TFE readers! If you're like me, you'll be sitting out Cannes this year, using the time to read press coverage or finally see that one thing you've been meaning to watch while others swan across the croisette, conduct interviews, and shill merch for Troma Studios. I'll be spending the 78th Cannes Film Festival and the site's 10|25|50|75|100 series to visit ceremonies of years past, making new friends and revisiting familiar faces. To kick things off, we'll be spending the next few days with some Palme d'Or winners!

Some of you might remember I did not particularly like Emilia Pérez, last year’s genre-explosive musical about a cartel leader striving to reconnect with their family after getting gender-affirming care, as facilitated by her lawyer/hostage/business partner. I will not linger on that mess too much, but there’s a nub to the discourse about Jacques Audiard’s failure to meaningfully engage with any aspect of Mexican culture I did have a problem with. Namely, the idea that him being a cis white French man means he’s inherently incapable of having anything to say about someone who falls outside any of those identity markers. Yes, we can and should discuss if the French as a nation are capable of empathy, but I don’t believe artists cannot and should not make art about people outside their demographics and lived experience . . . .

In particular, I thought a lot about Dheepan, and how Audiard portrayed a makeshift “family” escaping civil war in Sri Lanka and trying to plant roots in a French tenement house. Now that’s a tense film about people with sketchy pasts trying to make new lives from themselves, elevated in every way by Audiard’s consummate craftsmanship and the stellar performances of its Tamil protagonists. Holding them next to each other, I can better appreciate the common thematic threads which likely convinced Audiard that Emilia Pérez was in any way a logical thing for him to make. Dheepan was received divisively at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival even before it won the Palme d’Or, to the point where the jury practically announced their choice was a compromise between multiple factions. I don’t begrudge sore feelings about so-and-so’s pet favorite not winning, but we’re gonna bitch about this film winning the top prize? Be serious.

Dheepan follows Tamil Tiger soldier Sidhavasan (Antonythasan Jethusathan) in the immediate fallout of the Sri Lankan civil war. A child soldier now well into his 40s, Sidhavasan burns his uniform and goes to a refugee camp to apply for political asylum, where he is given the passports of a dead man named Dheepan Natarajan, his wife, and their 9-year-old daughter. “Dheepan” recruits two refugees to pose as his wife Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and daughter Illayaal (Claudine Vinasathambty), and in no time they’re crammed on a boat bound for Paris.

They’re quickly placed in the Le Pré housing complex, and set out to make a new, normal life while their citizenship claims are processed. Dheepan is hired as caretaker of several buildings in the complex, Illayaal is enrolled in school and placed in a remedial class to better learn French, and Yalini becomes a drop-in nurse for an infirm, older man whose son just radiates criminality from every pore. All three members of the Natarajan family face their own challenges with assimilating to France, be it social ostracism, language barriers, or more specific interpersonal fractures like a sense of humor. Ties to France’s immigrant Sri Lankan community are valuable without always being helpful. Le Pré also turns out to be a haven of gang activity, meaning their escape from one conflict has now facilitated their descent into a new arena of turf wars and shoot-outs which might demand their blood.

Audiard films all of this with a detailed realism punctuated by abstract images of lights bursting from darkness. These colors quickly reveal themselves as products of manual labor, the glow of a novelty light-up headband bobbing on a street vendor’s head or a welding fire bursting through a piece of metal, yet Éponine Momenceau’s lensing makes this motif poignant rather than cliched. In other segments the darkness of the night sky or an unlit bedroom endows an almost mythic quality to the image, at no cost to the grounded portraiture happening elsewhere. Her camera is as mobile and saturated in these show-iffy passages as it is throughout Dheepan. She’s marvelously attentive towards the complexions of her Sri Lankan protagonists, and knows how to visualize the different degrees of disillusionment and contentment developing in their relationship. Every element of sound, editing, and cinematography is marshaled towards a rigorous character study of forced cultural assimilation and moral crisis, set in a corner of France most films don’t convey this well.

Audiard also achieves a rich rapport with his main cast members. I’ve arguably given Illayaal more narrative emphasis in this write-up than she gets in the film, but Claudine Vinasathambty’s performance registers with the same depth and acuity as her two companions, sometimes subsuming her feelings when acting as the family translator and something helplessly consumed by a desire to belong to anyone. Antonythasan Jethusathan, himself a former child soldier who provided enough backstory and touch-ups to make this story more accurate, carries Dheepan’s internal conflicts and violent histories on his shoulders with such elegance. The scenes of Dheepan getting soused by himself are fairly rote, but Jethusathan makes up for this in his consummate playing in less demonstrative scenes, finding so many colors to Dheepan’s coiled, watchful exterior.

Best of all is Kalieaswari Srinivasan, whose open face and posture is so precise at suggesting Yalini’s thoughts without making her more transparent or naive than her husband. Yalini’s risk assessment is just as sturdy as Dheepan’s, even if they aren’t packing the same arsenal to protect themselves. Her scenes with Vincent Rottiers are perhaps an unexpected detour in Audiard’s script, the sort of expanse in character and setting that might fall flat if Srinivasan wasn’t so muscular in her acting, so affecting for how she transmits this woman’s sweetness and savvy. She and Jethusathan have tremendous chemistry, responding intimately to each other’s inflections while maintaining the heated psychologies the film needs to really sing. Where was her Best Actress prize?

Jury’s still out, or as out as it Cannes be, about whether the escalating violence of the last act and the golden glow of its coda are justified by the preceding 90+ minutes, or if it simply undoes all of Dheepan’s goodwill.  I understand both arguments, more so than I understand the arguments against it as an unworthy Palme winner. We all have our faves, but this is risky, complicated work from everyone involved, and a new aesthetic pinnacle for a director who’d cut his teeth on grotty criminal underworlds. For better and worse, the Palme clearly inspired Audiard to try new things, and let’s just be glad this award may have kept Emilia from taking the top prize last year. But not even a lackluster follow-up (though I have nothing against The Sisters Brothers) can diminish what Dheepan so mightily asserts and provokes, and how deserving it was of a spotlight it still hasn’t fully received.

Dheepan can be watched on most major video rental and streaming platforms. It is currently being hosted on The Criterion Channel.