The Palme d'Or winner at this year's Cannes Festival is Jacques Audiard's Dheepan, marking one of those rare occasions when a French film wins the prize. It is not a masterpiece although it is a good film whether from a artistic or an intellectual point of view. Dheepan is its maker's seventh fiction feature, with See How They Fall (1994), Audiard's debut, and A Prophet (2009), which was screened in the Cannes competition and gave the present-day star Tahar Rahim's his first break, being among his most important works. Like A Prophet, Dheepan is about the immigrant community in Paris, contributing to an issue that has preoccupied all of Europe with renewed force since the dawn of the Arab Spring. But while A Prophet focuses on Arab immigrants, Dheepan is about their Asian counterparts. Written by Audiard with Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, starring Antonythasan Jesuthasan as Dheepan and filmed for the wide screen by Eponine Momenceau with music by Nicolas Jaar, it is the story of a former Tamil Tiger in Sri Lanka who immigrates to France in 1993, eventually to become a French-language novelist; his first book, Gloria, was published in 2001 and later translated into English. Prior to the title, the film is on to a brilliant start with a scene of corpses being burned up in the course of the war while Dheepan looks on, pained. We then see the young woman Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) desperately searching for an orphan in the refugee camps so that, claiming it is her child, she will be allowed to board the immigrants' ship. She locates Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) and ends up standing in line with Dheepan, who claims he is her husband and Illayaal's father. The film derives much of its power from the resulting three-way relationship, founded on the hope of a new life in Paris. Before the world this is a small family but in reality there is no connection between them. Each respects the humanity and feelings of the others, however, so much so that when Dheepan is gripped by desire when he sees Yalini showering, he makes a point of leaving her alone – waiting till a relationship has grown between them. Tamil culture thus infuses the actors in a subtle way, taking physical form only in two scenes in which Dheepan dreams of an elephant. An expression of Audiard's commitment to immigrant rights, the film thus also manages to be a beautiful romantic story set against a largely bleak backdrop. This is the two actors' first film, but thanks no doubt to Audiard's coaching their performance is staggering. The substance of the drama is that, while he immigrates to get away from war, Dheepan is now living in the midst of constant wars between immigrant gangs. Even his own people ostracise him when he fails to comply with their criminal lifestyle. Audiard manages to criticise the state by emphasising the complete absence of police in the immigrants' quarter, where people are left to the whims of the gangs. Eventually Dheepan and Yalini barely survive murder in the course of one of these battles, and in the last seen we see them with Illayaal and their new baby in London: a powerful statement of hope and faith in the resilience and good will of humanity. FEATURE FILM AWARDS Palme d'Or DHEEPAN Directed by Jacques AUDIARD Grand Prix SAUL FIA (SON OF SAUL) Directed by László NEMES Award for Best Director HOU Hsiao-Hsien for NIE YINNIANG (THE ASSASSIN) Award for Best Screenplay Michel FRANCO for CHRONIC Award for Best Actress Ex-aequo Emmanuelle BERCOT in MON ROI Directed by MAÏWENN Rooney MARA in CAROL Directed by Todd HAYNES Award for Best Actor Vincent LINDON in LA LOI DU MARCHE (THE MEASURE OF A MAN) Directed by Stéphane BRIZE Jury Prize THE LOBSTER Directed by Yorgos LANTHIMOS SHORT FILMS Palme d'Or - Short Film WAVES ‘98 Directed by Ely DAGHER
