When the movie started rolling, I realized to my horror that Dheepan might be a socially forward refugee drama, i. e. a deeply emphatic slush story about refugees coming to Europe, having to deal with hardship, being discriminated and exploited, with their dreams eventually being crushed by a cruel and uncaring society. It's not that I'm twisted and cynical and don't care about other people's plight in real life, only I don't get a kick out of being moralized in my spare time. Luckily, Dheepan's -- the main character's -- story takes another turn. At first we see him escaping from a refugee camp in India; together with a young woman and a girl, they pose as a family, although they have never seen each other before, and manage to escape to Paris. Here, Dheepan struggles to get by, hustling cheap merchandise to café patrons. Then he manages to land a job as a janitor in the suburbs. Suffice it to say that les banlieues in this movie are rifer with crime than the Lower East Side in Once Upon A Time In America. Far from Gay Pareeh, Dheepan finds himself in far hotter water than he'd expected. Ultimately he makes a last stand against the criminals who have humiliated him for so long.
Dheepan is at the same time a fascinating as well as a deeply flawed movie. Like I said, I was very glad that it went off the trodden path, and it tells a surprising story in a captivating way. It's beautifully shot and acted. The director shows great courage by refusing to humanize the -- mostly Arab and black -- criminals. He displays them as criminals, i. e. not terribly nice people. But not everything pans out. First of, the Parisian suburbs are displayed as some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland, which is way beyond the pale. There seem to be a lot of sub-stories which don't check out, e. g. the criminals resent Dheepan fixing the elevator, but we never get to know why. In the end there is an explosion of senseless violence that puts The Expendables to shame, and suddenly we find Dheepan living a new life in England, with the girl nowhere to be seen.
If you ask me, the Palme D'Or was rightly awarded, and for artistic reasons and not for political correctness. But it is an imperfect, flawed movie.
Dheepan is at the same time a fascinating as well as a deeply flawed movie. Like I said, I was very glad that it went off the trodden path, and it tells a surprising story in a captivating way. It's beautifully shot and acted. The director shows great courage by refusing to humanize the -- mostly Arab and black -- criminals. He displays them as criminals, i. e. not terribly nice people. But not everything pans out. First of, the Parisian suburbs are displayed as some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland, which is way beyond the pale. There seem to be a lot of sub-stories which don't check out, e. g. the criminals resent Dheepan fixing the elevator, but we never get to know why. In the end there is an explosion of senseless violence that puts The Expendables to shame, and suddenly we find Dheepan living a new life in England, with the girl nowhere to be seen.
If you ask me, the Palme D'Or was rightly awarded, and for artistic reasons and not for political correctness. But it is an imperfect, flawed movie.