Dheepan (2015)
Directed by Jacques Audiard
Three war-torn strangers posing as a family flee Sri Lanka’s civil war to start over in a troubled Paris suburb, but their past traumas resurface as they struggle to survive in their new environment.
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What critics say influenced Dheepan
“Dheepan” pulls its poverty-stricken characters together only to atomize the community in a bloody climax that’s cinematic as hell yet dramatically unconvincing, as though a finely observed fable had decided to go out with a “Taxi Driver” bang.
Audiard rejects a more reasonable ending in favor of a slate-clearing, Taxi Driver -inspired climax, which pointlessly fringes into fantasy territory.
…by Bill Chambers "Well, not exactly," a critic acquaintance gently scoffed after I shrugged that Dheepan was "y'know, Taxi Driver."
The drift towards a violent, cathartic showdown, with echoes of Death Wish and Taxi Driver, sits uneasily with what has gone before but provides a suitably dramatic finale to a solid and engrossing Audiard drama.
For director Jacques Audiard to snag his industry's greatest prize for "Dheepan" instead of his greater earlier efforts, "The Beat that My Heart Skipped" and "A Prophet," is roughly tantamount to Martin Scorsese landing the Best Director Oscar for "The Departed" instead of "Taxi Driver" or "Goodfellas."
Early word of mouth even compared it to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) in both atmosphere and in its explosive third-act climax of visceral violence.
His story is a modern “Straw Dogs” about a man pushed to his breaking point in a world where he can’t escape the horrors of violence.
Audiard has said "Dheepan" was inspired by Sam Peckinpah 's "Straw Dogs" (1971) and his focus on Sri Lankan immigrants was chosen largely for narrative purposes.
The filmmaker has said that he and his co-writer Thomas Bidegain wanted to craft a Straw Dogs-style flick and then worked their ways backwards to the diaspora scenario, and you wished the process had been reversed.
Much of the movie unfolds like "A History of Violence" with an immigrant twist, as Sivadhasan and his surrogate family begin to sink deeper into their roles.
Like Viggo Mortensen’s Tom Stall in “A History of Violence,” Dheepan is The Family Man With a Dark Past.