TIFF Review: Dheepan

*This review was originally written for The Film Experience.

Whether Jacques Audiard’s latest film, Dheepan, benefits from the pedigree of its Palme d’or or becomes victim to raised expectations isn’t clear. What is already clear, however, is that the film’s reception has been truly baffling: on the one hand, the Cannes prize is one of the festival’s more curious decisions; on the other, the extent of vitriol that the film receives seems equally unwarranted. Dheepan is on the same emotional and stylistic wavelength as Audiard’s previous films, and it is about ten minutes — admittedly a disastrous ten minutes — away from being on par with his best work.

The story revolves around three Sri Lankan refugees, who escaped civil war in their home country to reside in the notorious suburbs of Paris. Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan), Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) are not a family, but pretend to be husband, wife and daughter to gain political asylum. The titular character finds work as a caretaker in a residential complex that houses violent gangs. It’s an environment not entirely unlike the war zone from which they’ve fled.

Much of the strength of the film lies in its universality. It’s a particularly timely film, as the refugee crisis rages on in the real world, and Dheepan isn’t particularly tied to the specifics of Parisian neighborhoods or Tamil tigers. The story of this immigrant “family” is moving precisely because it relatable irrespective of the details. In its best moments, Audiard’s film is tense and heartbreaking. Antonythasan and Srinivasan both deliver remarkable performances, deftly portraying the balance of vulnerability and defiance that their characters embody in their new home.

What works to the film’s detriment is Audiard’s insistence on weaving the family’s narrative to the minutiae of the violence engulfing them. Some of these connections are simply nonsensical—Dheepan is threatened in one intense and seemingly momentous scene by a Tamil warlord, for example, but the subplot is never revisited—and others are merely muddled. All of their conflicts with the gang members build up to a violent breakout near the film’s end, a shrill, amateurishly stylized sequence that diminishes the film’s emotional impact. Audiard’s attempt to rectify this digression makes matters even worse, when the complexity of the story is diluted through rose-tinted glasses. It’s a misstep entirely uncharacteristic for a filmmaker who’s built a career from melodramatic treatments of tough subjects, and one that unfortunately ends Dheepan on an unsatisfying note.

Jealousy

Grade: C

*This review was originally published at Movie Mezzanine.

Philippe Garrel’s Jealousy (La Jalousie) opens with a static medium shot of Clothilde (Rebecca Convenant). The young, blond woman’s lips begin to tremble and tears gradually stream down her face. It’s a stunning composition and one that instantly throws us in the emotional whirlwind she is experiencing. Despite the complete absence of background information about her at this point, there’s an immediacy and punch to the scene that sweeps us up. It’s as powerful an opening as one can expect, upon whose promise the film unfortunately never quite delivers.

Jealousy tells the story of Louis – though the concept of “telling a story” is used very loosely here – a young man who is revealed to be the reason behind Clothilde’s tears, breaking up with her in a conversation we witness through the keyhole from the perspective of their bubbly daughter, Charlotte (Olga Milstein). Louis is played by the director’s son, the eponymous Louis Garrel, in his fifth outing with Garrel Sr. Louis is a struggling actor, a fact that Jealousy emphasizes via many clichéd visual hints: the perfectly imperfect coiffure, the absent gazes, and his general gloomy, confused look. All that and there are still wistful musical cues, too.

The failure of Louis’s marriage is partially due to a passionate affair with another struggling actor, the posh, raspy-voiced Claudia (Anna Mouglalis), whose mere introduction in the film portends another failing relationship. This unfortunate predictability isn’t entirely Claudia’s fault; instead, the film’s heavily New Wave-inspired mood is so familiar that little is left to the imagination. The triangular path of this romantic entanglement is well trodden and outdated, and Garrel adds nothing to the formula that has been in practice since the era of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Without that element of friction, a romantic unpredictability, Jealousy waltzes through its compact running time, offering glimpses of men and women whose lives in which we are inexplicably asked to be invested.

The End of the New Wave, the Beginning of My Cinephilia

Francois Truffaut's Day for Night

*This article was originally published at The Film Experience.

Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were the poster boys of the French New Wave, its most recognizable faces. Their friendship that had begun in the 1940s had carried them through all their years at Cahiers and into their directing careers, was evidenced by Godard’s adoration of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and the latter’s providing the story for his friend’s first film, Breathless. Their early writings manifest the division they had from the beginning about their outlook on the mechanics and politics of cinema. Nonetheless, their friendship continued even through the fraught days of political disagreement in 1968; but no further than 1973. Truffaut’s Day for Night (La Nuit Americaine) was an unforgivable crime in Godard’s eyes, and the latter’s disapproval of the film was a massive act of hypocrisy in Truffaut’s.  They were to never see each other again, and only after Truffaut’s death did Godard find nice words to say about his old friend.

It’s easy to see why Day for Night made Godard’s blood boil. It’s as conventionally constructed a film as one can expect from a nouevelle vague filmmaker, an unashamed love letter to Hollywood and cinema itself – and with an Oscar in its cap, no less. By this time in his career, Truffaut had already been branded a sellout by some and would continue to be called as such. He had, in the opinion of some of the New Wave’s proponent’s, become the very cinema he criticized in his youth. There was no political edge to Day for Night; no radical revision of how the medium operates. It was “a lie,” thought Godard. Some of those accusations might be true, but there is another truth that isn’t mentioned as often: this is an incredible film.

When I first watched Day for Night, I was 19. It was in the days when Toronto’s Bloor Cinema wasn’t yet devoted to screening documentaries. It was a cheap, dingy but friendly gathering place for the neighborhood’s elderly and University of Toronto’s students. The repertory screenings weren’t of rare, obscure directors but mostly of the films a young cinephile knows are must-watches. It was an ideal way to see the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Vertigo on the big screen for the first time. It was a perfect way to be introduced to François Truffaut as well, the man who would go on to become my favorite filmmaker, give or take Abbas Kiarostami.

Blue Is the Warmest Colour

Blue Is the Warmest Colour (B+)

In the months since Abdellatif Kechiche's intimate, epically scaled romantic film won the coveted Palme d'or at the Cannes Film Festival, it has been steeped in more controversy than any film in recent memory. Though as a personal principle I always refrain from reading reviews of films I have not yet seen, the discussions on twitter and the war of words between the film's director and one of its stars has been inescapable. Having now seen the film and enjoyed it for the most part, I can't help but sympathize with sentiments against Kechiche's approach to portraying the sexual interactions between the film's lesbian couple and worse yet, the female anatomy in general. So, let's get all that bad stuff out of the way first.

Stepping out of the theatre after my screening, I was left with an uneasy feeling that can, if I'm being really kind, be described as needing a shower. It isn't just that Blue's already infamous sex scene runs at least a couple of minutes too long for the liking of anyone who's watching the film as a purely cinematic experience and not a pornographic one. What can at least be argued for that scene - and all preceding and subsequent displays of sexual intercourse - is that they serve a purpose in the narrative. It is beyond the limits of my knowledge, responsibility and ethical behavior as a critic to speculate about whether Mr. Kechiche would paint such a painstakingly graphic portrayal of homosexual intercourse if the partners in question were male, but we could have given him the benefit of doubt if the several instances of casual female objectification didn't pepper the film from start to finish.

One struggles to think of any justification for the generous number of shots we see of Adele asleep on her stomach at night, framed from the bottom of her legs to emphasize her behind. With the exception of one instance - her first kiss with Emma in the park - how can one explain countless extreme close-ups of Adele's lips - again mostly in her sleep - except to wonder if the man behind the camera was just far too happy emphasizing excessively on Adele's body parts. These sexualized framings happen over and over again but the most outrageous example of them is a shot of Adele showering near the end of the film, wherein the camera inexplicably tracks her body from toe to head as she stands in an inconceivably uncomfortable position with open legs and "washes" herself. It's quite disturbing, too, that these exploitative displays of the female form happen far more regularly in the first half of the film, where the emphasis of the narrative is on Adele's naivete and immaturity. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

Forbidden Games, Forbidden Tears

*This post is part of Nathaniel's Hit Me With Your Best Shot Series.

In an attempt to finish this post in time for this week's Best Shot episode, I really had to rush the write-up, which is unfortunate, because Rene Clement's hard-hitting masterpiece deserves much, much more attention. I hadn't seen this rarely discussed, early winner of the best foreign language film Oscar since my francophone grandpa showed it to me as a kid. I remembered next to nothing about it and I was so immersed that for long stretches of its run time I completely forgot I was watching it to pick a favorite shot. It washed over me and touched me in a way few films have ever done; and though I tried my very best to hold it in me for fear of embarrassing myself in public - I was watching the film in the quietude of University of Toronto's library, where I'd borrowed the DVD - that exquisite final shot of Brigitte Fossey finally brought me down to tears.

Forbidden Games isn't necessarily a film that strikes the viewer as a visual triumph. Although there are frame-worthy moments in its low key lit, chiaroscuro compositions, its charms are not quite the product of decorated designs or cinematographic tricks, but of the fragile, often intangible, beauty of human interaction. Clement's story delicately shows the best and worst in all of us and the shots that subtly imply truths in those moments are the best in the film: that of an abusive father versus the innocence of children's affections for one another, the secret, passionate love affair between neighboring youngsters versus their parents' equally impassioned, tribal disdain for each other, the horrors of war versus the tenderness of motherly care.

In the end, my favorite shot in the film came down to two options. First was the aforementioned final shot of the film, but that's almost too perfect, too obvious a choice. So I'm settling for one of the moments that really struck out to me early in the film. Paulette, the film's young heroine, has just lost both her parents to an air strike by German forces. She's carrying her wounded dog with her when she's found by a fleeing woman whose overloaded carriage can barely fit an extra person on. She looks at the little girl's dog, noticing that he has already died and asks Paulette to toss it away before getting on. Paulette, who still hasn't quite grasped the gravity of her parents' death, looks at the woman in utter disbelief, then looks back at the immobile dog and asks "He's dead?" Seconds later, the old woman takes the dog out of her hands and throws it over the bridge into the running river; it's almost as if she's been stripped completely of her sense of compassion by the brutality of war. It's a shot that encapsulates, in one brief moment, the extent of all the little girl's troubles to come.

Paulette is taken aback, enough to jump off the carriage and follow her dog along the river - and start the film's narrative in the process - but she's still almost too distraught to actually feel emotions. Fossey maintains that sort of ambiguous, on-edge expressiveness throughout the film. Her performance miraculously manages to walk the fine line - or rather, create a fine line - between childish, carefree bliss and grave grief, as if she's young enough to forget her pains quickly but also old enough to rationally comprehend death and be cerebral about it.