Dheepan (2015) - Jacques Audiard

At its core, Jacques Audiard's Dheepan is a film about the psychlogical effects of war, attempting to illustrate the long lasting trappings such horror and tragedy can have on the psyche of a good natured person.  The story follows Dheepan, who was serving as a Tamil freedom fighter in Sri Lanka.  Falling on the side of defeat as the war reaches its end, Dheepan has seen a lot of death, including the presumed murder of his wife and child.  Fleeing the country, Dheepan has two strangers accompanying him, a woman and a little girl who are claiming to be his wife and daughter, with the hope being that this will make it easier to achieve asylum in Europe.  Arriving in Paris, the "family" moves into what could only be described as a run-down paris slum, with Dheepan getting work as a caretaker.  Attempting to build a new life, Dheepan is confronted with the unfortunate reality that his new environment is also one infested with bubbling violence, forcing him to confront the demons of his past.   The first half of Jacques Audiard's Dheepan is near masterful, with the filmmaker delivering a compelling examination of the immigrant experience.  Dheepan's inner turmoil is compelling but it  is only of this migrant stories unique twists that make this film's narrative compelling.  These characters not only face the difficulty of adjusting to this new culture and language, they also must learn how to act like a family. withh one of the film's stronger attributes being its characterizations of both Dheepan and  Yalini, his "wife".  Dheepan is a character who is desperate to start over and escape his dark past, refusing to accept the fact that he has simply left the hostility in Sri Lanka for a different hostile environment where he is surrounded by drug dealers and mafia types- his past has become his present.  Compounding this fact is his relationship with Yalini and  his "daughter", as the seemingly broken man begins to get confused about the nature of their relationship, as one can imagine his past trauma related to his own wife and child has clouded his perception.  Dheepan is compelling, showing subtlety and nuance in its deconstruction of postwar trauma and migration story but unfortunately that all changes towards the end of the film, with Audiard injecting the film with a little too much Action, which is certainly well directed, but feels a tad forced, inorganic, and blunt to a film that had been told to that point with such nuance and grace.  While personally I'd argue that the ending of Dheepan wraps things up a little too nicely, there is no denying that Jacques Audiard has delivered another well-crafted film in Dheepan, in which the film's  intimacy and characterizations are its strongest attributes. 

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