Winding down Cannes with a treasure hunt and a misguided immigrant drama
7:45 a.m Hotel check-out takes longer than hoped for, and I end up arriving at the Grand Théâtre Lumière just late enough to be denied entry to a press screening, but too early to be let into the Palais, where the press lounge is located. I wait on a bench near the red carpet. Across from me is a bearded man in a full tuxedo with a big Jake Gittes bandage over his nose, half-soaked with blood. He is hungrily eating a panini. I consider this my one and only glimpse at the Felliniesque element of Cannes.
11:31 a.m. Jacques Audiard’s Main Competition entry Dheepan (Grade: C) is one of those bad Taxi Driver interpretations that takes Travis Bickle at face value, except it’s disguised—at first, anyway—as a drama about three Sri Lankan Tamils who get refugee status in France by pretending to be husband, wife, and daughter. Moved to a gang-run housing project outside Paris, they get jobs, go to school, and go about keeping up the appearance of family in front of their neighbors, most of whom are on more or less friendly terms with the drug dealers who spend all day hanging out in the building doorways or keeping lookout from the roof.
Dheepan has its fine qualities, namely Jesuthasan Antonythasan and Kalieaswari Srinivasan’s performances as total strangers playing parents to a 9-year-old orphan, and Audiard’s more or less sincere early attempts at depicting the tricky circumnavigation of legal boundaries that comes with entering a society from the bottom. But an ending is more than a final stop; ideally, it’s the place where a movie is taking its viewer. Here, that place is a reactionary fantasy of improvised weapons and bad drug dealers getting what’s coming to them, as seen through Éponine Momenceau’s inexpressive and impersonal handheld camera. (Audiard’s regular cinematographer, Stéphane Fontaine, is sorely missed here.)