Dheepan (Jacques Audiard,2015): France

Reviewed by Maxime de Rooij. Viewat at the AFI Fest 2015 in Hollywood.

This is a very interesting and pathetic movie. You really realize how lucky you are with your life and to live in peace and that is why Dheepan won the Palme d’Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

Jacques Audiard is the director of this movie with Jesuthasa Antonyhasan as one of the main actors who played Dheepan and his fake family, Kalieaswari Srinivasan who played Yalini the fake mother and Claudine Vunasithamby who played Illayaal, the fake daughter.

The movie start intense. A man from the army is watching dead bodies that are on fire. Dheepan is a timid freedom fighter, a tiger. In Sri Lanka the civil war is reaching its end and defeat is near. Dheepan decides to flee, taking with him two strangers, a woman and a little girl. He thinks it is easier this way to claim asylum in Europe. The woman is looking for a fake daughter, and asks everyone if the child has a mother. Then she finds a girl who doesn’t have a mother and takes her with her. When they arrived in Paris, the fake family moved from one temporary home to another until Dheepan finds work as the caretaker of a run-down housing block in the suburbs. They try to build up a new live. They don’t really care about the girl in the beginning and there is not that much love but that changes and they fall in love and treat the girl as their own daughter. But I can imagine that it is hard to live life as a lie. To live with total strangers as a family. But when they are in France they still live in a bad and dangerous place. There is a lot of violence and it confronts Dheepan quickly with his war wounds. Dheepan is forced to reconnect with his warrior’s instincts to protect people and he hopes they will become his true family. In the end they finally travel to England and have a good life and a true family.

In the movie you see a lot of faces and their impression that makes the movie intense. And the culture differences is interesting to see. The daughter who is scared of the school bell. Deephan who doesn’t like the French humor. They can make everything with their hands, Deephan who makes his own toolbox. Also their music which they listen to from their own country, the fait and the clothes which they normally wear.

In one scene the bad boys from the French neighborhood gang go on a moped but the shot is overexposed so you know something is going to happen and it does, they have a shooting fight. But the mother and daughter find a way to escape.

Mustang and this film are so similar. In both films they need to try to survive and make the best of it. In both movies you see a lot back of their own faith and in both movies they have a bad life and in the end a better and free life.

It is intense, interesting, sad and it has humoristic parts in the movie. If you like realistic movies then this is definitely something for you.