Critics reviews

For all our hand-wringing... there are not many new European movies that take on the point of view of the outsider like this, with an air of seething apprehension. That's the film's ultimate political salience, in the sense of realigning the culture's default ideas of itself, of seeing what we have wrought, the fringes of our globalized reality, as an inevitable, ever-expanding territory of the proles. Realism can do this, particularly in the hands of a filmmaker like Audiard.

The movie is an extension, and in some ways a combination, of the narratives in A Prophetand Rust and Bone. As with A Prophet, the hero of the story is an outsider, both his immediate surroundings and in France generally, who gradually takes back his agency by exacting revenge on people who've wronged him. And like Rust and Bone, Dheepan is a melodrama in which sudden plot shifts mirror the tumult of the protagonists' situations.

There's a hallucinatory aspect to the film's sense of time. Multiple shots are framed in darkness only to reveal an animal or person slowly coming into focus. Audiard wants these moments to have a profound visual impact on the viewer, to build mood out of obscured and dreamlike imagery. Yet it has the opposite effect, instilling a sense of artificial tunnel vision in an otherwise gritty worldview.

It too often seems like a vigilante psych evaluation that's been left partially incomplete. That's not enough, though, to stop Audiard's film from being admirable on the whole—as a study of tenuous family dynamics, and as a humanist drama that brings home the sheer loneliness of the asylum seeker, it's an arresting piece of work.

If we hadn't spent an hour and a half getting to know Dheepan and Yalini, watching them interact with each other and with "outsiders," if we hadn't been so immersed in their steep learning-curve in a new culture, the ending wouldn't jar. "Dheepan" is well worth seeing, in spite of that. See it for the performances. There you will find the whole story.

Dheepan is nearly a superb film, but its flaws are no easier to overlook a year after its premiere. Nevertheless, Dheepan is a pretty good Jacques Audiard film, and certainly a very ambitious one. It has a strong imaginative agenda, in the sense that Audiard is a director who likes to conjure up the idea of a specific real, or at least realistic, environment (the prison of A Prophet, the unglamorous hinterlands of the South of France in Rust and Bone) and explore it in vivid, immersive detail.

Dheepan, in essence, functions like A Prophet in reverse: It's a sober drama about the immigrant experience that smuggles in a bloody drug thriller in the third act. This time, though, it feels like Audiard is sabotaging his own movie... What started as a piercing drama about refugees, rooted firmly in the ethnic crises that have plagued modern Paris, shifts into a cathartic melee that nearly tips into outright fantasy. One part of the film can't be reconciled with the other.

Jacques Audiard's misbegotten Palme D'Or winner Dheepan aspires to be a Taxi Driver for today's Europe, but ends up as a crude cross between Death Wish and Ken Loach... Audiard has found success in translating the self-destructive male loners of 1970s American film into present-day France, but here, it comes across as laughable instead of troubling, mustering only a fraction of its Stateside forebears' momentum and style.

For a time the film settles into a character study, as their family act gradually becomes reality. The intimate scenes are lovely, such as when the little girl tries to explain to Yalini how a mother should act. Their building is eventually consumed by a drug war, and a late explosion of violence works better as metaphor than it does as logical drama. The remarkable performances from the central trio are what carries the film.

The film ultimately seems to have little investment in portraying or elucidating the Sri Lankan Civil War... These characters are propelled by a desire to step out of their pasts and sprint towards a better future. Yet the film's only preoccupations are with the present day. By consequence, the Sri Lankan Civil War remains in the abstract—a glaring miscalculation for a film that trades off Sri Lankan bodies with such ease.

Dheepan is a failure. It's just a disappointment by Audiard's high standards. It isn't hair-raising and breathtaking like A Prophet, or fiercely elemental like Rust and Bone, or fevered and perverse like The Beat That My Heart Skipped. The sad truth is that it's a little soft, a little too reluctant to kick open its characters' doors.

That sense of imbalance, the idea of the ground constantly shifting under these characters — and, by extension, the audience — plays to director Audiard's strengths, to the emotional intimacy of his camera and the urgency with which he relays immediate experience.