Movie Review - Dheepan

Dheepan (2016)

Starring Antonythasan Jesuthasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, and Claudine Vinasithamby

Directed by Jacques Audiard

***This film is currently streaming via Netflix***

Winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival doesn't always mean that you're in for a good movie as I often feel it carries with it the weight of pretentiousness.  That's the case with Dheepan, a flick that means well in its depiction of the immigrant plight across Europe, but ends up feeling unfocused.  After his side loses the Sri Lankan civil war, Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) manages to receive asylum in France by receiving a dead man's passport, but he must pretend to be married to a woman he's never met in order to escape his country.  Dheepan, his "wife" Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), and his "daughter" Illayaal (ClaudineVinasithamby) -- a girl whom Yalini plucked from a poor Sri Lankan family in order to secure her visa -- arrive in France unscathed and live in an apartment complex where Deephan gets a job as a superintendent.

If the film had just dealt with the isolation they felt in a foreign country or the difficulty of living together despite not knowing one another, Dheepan may have been successful.  Instead, it shifts in its second half to focusing on a Parisian mob group that lives in the complex where Dheepan lives and works.  In the final minutes, the flick turns into some odd Taken-esque revenge saga that fails to make much sense in the midst of everything that comes before it.  Granted, considering the military man Dheepan was back in Sri Lanka, it's not necessarily out of his character, but the final minutes of the film stand in such contrast to much of what comes before that it simply didn't work for me.  It doesn't help that the story that precedes this tonal shift fails to be very interesting.  There are some nice performances here from the three central characters, but Dheepan squanders them in a dry, unexciting film.

The RyMickey Rating:  C-