Dheepan won the Golden Palm in Cannes recently so it's normal you walk in expecting to see a great movie, if not a masterpiece. However, I feel either the competition in Cannes was pretty average OR the Golden Palm went to Dheepan for political reasons, being the current refugee crisis Europe is facing which makes the movie highly actual.
Don't get me wrong: Dheepan is certainly not a bad movie. The story line about a Tamil rebel in Sri Lanka escaping to France with a fake id and a fake wife and daughter seams promising at first. Everyone is acting top notch but where the movie fails is the stereotypical portrayal of the suburbs in France, making it seam as these are only drug territories and there is literally in the movie not one normal human being around. The movie completely goes out of the bend in the last 15 minutes in which the main character suddenly becomes a Travis Bickle Taxi Driver copycat and starts shooting anyone in sight. At this point the movie becomes plainly a bad action movie, because the way it is shot is not even better than your average action movie. Probably the director was intending to show some sort of catharsis or wanted to give a moral message how people become violent, but frankly even Death Wish or Taxi Driver did a much better job of showing a 'good' person turning nasty.
So, I do have pretty mixed feeling about Dheepan and I suspect heavily the Golden Palm was awarded more from a political point of view than an artistic one.
Don't get me wrong: Dheepan is certainly not a bad movie. The story line about a Tamil rebel in Sri Lanka escaping to France with a fake id and a fake wife and daughter seams promising at first. Everyone is acting top notch but where the movie fails is the stereotypical portrayal of the suburbs in France, making it seam as these are only drug territories and there is literally in the movie not one normal human being around. The movie completely goes out of the bend in the last 15 minutes in which the main character suddenly becomes a Travis Bickle Taxi Driver copycat and starts shooting anyone in sight. At this point the movie becomes plainly a bad action movie, because the way it is shot is not even better than your average action movie. Probably the director was intending to show some sort of catharsis or wanted to give a moral message how people become violent, but frankly even Death Wish or Taxi Driver did a much better job of showing a 'good' person turning nasty.
So, I do have pretty mixed feeling about Dheepan and I suspect heavily the Golden Palm was awarded more from a political point of view than an artistic one.