Dheepan

The man in the lead had lived the part. Antonythasan Jesuthasan is not a professional actor; he fought as a child soldier with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, fled the country, and became a writer in France. He and Kalieaswari Srinivasan both made their screen debuts here. Three strangers assemble a fake family in order to get into France. A former fighter, a woman and a child; on paper a father, a mother and a daughter. They are housed on a Paris estate run by the drug trade. He takes work there as a caretaker, and having escaped one war he lands inside another. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2015, from a jury headed by the Coen brothers. It was Audiard's first. The last section is contested: Audiard drops the realist register for genre, and that shift split the critics. Who it is for: viewers who like migration told through the mechanics of assembling a family, in a hard and distanced register. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a consistent tone. The violence in the final act and the ending that follows contradict the film's own realism.