Tag: Jacques Audiard

Dheepan

Jacques Audiard directs the story of a Sri Lankan Tamil warrior turned refugee in France.

DheepanPosterIn “Dheepan,” a Sri Lankan Tamil warrior gets smuggled into France as a refugee, but not before being paired with a family who will allow him to escape. A 25-year-old woman searches the Sri Lankan slums and plucks an orphan 9-year-old girl from the crowd to pose as her daughter. In an instant, the three are in this together.

“Dheepan” doesn’t concern itself with politics, but it will change how people look at the refugee crisis around the world because of how the film deals with acclimating to and accepting new conditions.

Jacques Audiard’s (“A Prophet,” “Rust and Bone”) film, the winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes 2015, isn’t limited to the story of its title character Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan). His “wife” Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and his “daughter” Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) are equally at risk of trying to survive away from home. Dheepan gets a job in France as a caretaker for some low rent apartments, and Yalini takes up housekeeping for an elderly man, all while trying to navigate the gang activity and violence going on around them.

Thankfully for them, life in even this poorer region of France proves to be a major improvement from the war torn Sri Lanka. Illayaal gets her own room and a chance to go to school. Yalini asks their landlord if it’s okay to drink the tap water, and he reacts as though it were a bizarre question. Dheepan quickly earns respect and good money as a capable handyman, a step up from incinerating corpses. And all the people of their community are generally polite.

More troubling is how the three manage to keep up the appearance of a family without any love in their life. Yalini hints that she wants to call her cousin and move to London, even at the expense of leaving Illayaal behind. As for Dheepan, he can’t seem to shake the war he left behind, watching clips of the footage from back home, and the film comes to a sensational end when he manages to recreate those same horrors in France.

Audiard’s strength lies in extracting some tantalizing, surprising imagery from this grim, realistic story. To start the film, Dheepan emerges from a black abyss wearing blinking red and blue mouse ears, a surreal beacon for a man adrift. A few moments linger on an elephant’s face creeping out from within the deep forest, and that sense of lurking danger carries throughout the wide angle crane shots looking over the slums.

But above all, “Dheepan” succeeds because it’s a complex story of how people acclimate to practical surroundings and emotional ones. This family’s grief and culture clash struggles aren’t near as interesting as whether they’ll manage to stick together, and “Dheepan” has drama in both realms in spades.

3 ½ stars

Rust and Bone

Ali (Matthias Schoenearts) is always OP. OP is short for operational, which in Stephanie’s (Marion Cotillard) terms means, if she’s ever looking for sex, he’s available. But clearly if this relationship is going to survive, Ali needs to be more than just functioning.

“Rust and Bone” is a film about incomplete people. They’re emotionally damaged and physically broken, and they need each other to mend. It’s a lush, powerful French romance recognizing that for as much as we love, we’re not always all there.

It begins by introducing us to Ali and his 5-year-old son Sam (Armand Verdure), both traveling without much money or a job to finally reach Ali’s sister Louise (Celine Sailette). He’s had to resort to theft and train hopping to feed his son, and the abrupt editing provides us with punctuated moments of fatherly care. He soon gets a job as a bouncer and meets Stephanie when she’s being harassed at his club.

Stephanie is a trainer at a SeaWorld in France, working with the killer whales in the stadium shows, but after a horrible accident in a scene so riveting you can hear a pin drop in the audience, both of her legs have to be amputated.

Director Jacques Audiard (“A Prophet”) handles this realization beautifully. It’s a long shot of Stephanie’s lonely hospital room, looking in from a door at a bed that looks as though something is missing from beneath the covers. She pulls back her blanket and her legs have disappeared, which is especially impressive considering the actress, the lovely Marion Cotillard, has legs that go on forever. They’ve been digitally removed, and Cotillard is miraculously convincing as a person hampered by this new disability.

For a while she seems lost in time and beyond help, the editing drifting slowly as she looks on emptily. Months pass and she calls Ali out of the blue to help her around. The two form a mutual bond built on friendship first, then sex, but it’s clear each needs the other more than they let on.

Schoenaerts gives a wonderfully unsentimental performance. Training as a kick boxer and participating in vicious back alley brawls for money, he’s intensely unpredictable. His personality reflects the movie’s tone. He’s harsh, ambiguous and abrasive, but he has a sense of humor, heart and energy. Stephanie goes through a rebirth of sorts when she’s dropped into the water to swim for the first time since she lost her legs, but it’s Ali who helps pull her out, showing the harried fatherly care of a person who doesn’t have any real responsibility to care for this human being, but feels obligated all the same.

“Rust and Bone” is cinematically stunning, often feeling like the visual tone poem “The Deep Blue Sea” tried to be. There’s a beautiful shot of Cotillard touching the side of an aquarium and being met by the nose of a killer whale, a perfectly elegant and symbolic statement about two unlikely beings forming a bond.

But through the use of pop songs and a grizzled, handheld cam in other moments, “Rust and Bone” is more grounded than some of the art house fare you could compare it to. Stephanie is occasionally surly and quick to lose her temper, and Ali is a deadbeat father who sleeps around and takes shady jobs. Both of these people are far from perfect, and although they both are mending physically, Stephanie with prosthetic legs and Ali in the gym, they still have a lot of mental growing to do.

4 stars