Wonderful character development!

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

(Flash Review)Dheepan is a freedom fighter from Shi Lanka. He escapes from his life and the country's civil war by finding two strangers to pose as a family with him, a young woman and a young girl, and they flee to France not knowing the language. As the faux family tries to make roots, they are placed in a blighted housing development where a drug gangs live and operate. As they live like a family, emotions begin to emerge as they would in a normal family. Will the three of them give into their emotions or keep a distance until they can move on separately? This part of the story is told smartly though effective cinematography. Nothing flashy yet telling more through visuals than words. In conjunction with the faux family dynamic, is how the drug dealers interfere with their daily lives. Strife arises and one must remember Dheepan's background as a soldier; interesting things play out. This was a smart and gritty movie with really good acting.

This was a wonderful film that depicts a experiences of a refugee 'family' as they try to establish a life in France. Oddly enough, the ending of this film has been highly criticized. IMO, the people who have criticized the ending perhaps have not carefully thought through the events leading up to that 'ending.' Dheepan's wife is held hostage and Dheepan goes to the rescue. He attacks a couple of gang members with a machete and then, using a confiscated gun, kills several more gang members on his way up to the top floor of the apartment building where his wife is being held. The building is still surrounded and controlled by violent gang members. Without much doubt, the police are on their way there, too. It seems that the only real 'ending' for Dheepan is either to be killed by gang members - after all, he's on the top floor with no logical escape route - OR - to be arrested by the police for murder. It's not even imaginable that he escaped that situation unscathed. It's even more unimaginable that he could have gotten out of there and then emigrated to England.The 'ending' then is not the real ending to Dheepan's story. His story obviously did not end well. The 'ending' tagged into the film is a dream - a dream of what might have been. The 'ending' is shot in warm, hazy tones, no one has aged or changed - It's a wish, a dream, a last fleeting thought.

I will try to make a brief analysis on storytelling, since it is the story and the storytelling that make this movie beautiful, probably brought the golden palm.That a film which shows the very low lives in France, has received the attention, that is also worth note-taking. The story is smoothly developed without too much exaggerations. Three people join each other to make a good picture for a proper refugee application, and through time they regain their confidence and become a real family, showing the other wreaks in the modern cities. It genuinely touches our today's world issues. It well documents for the future generations to explain our time. While in some places over the world like Sri Lanka, Ruanda, Syrian Kurdish regions mass killings take place, in the western urbans we have gangs and other crimes to worry. Dheepan is not depicting freaky situations like sexual harassment, very rich lives contrasted with the very poor life of the protagonist ( A cliché in a luxury restaurant would have been disturbing in the movie) . Also, usually in that kind of lives you could see many sexual, material and power abuses. But the movie do not touch these kind of elements, which help you focus on other elements in the movie. Probably much people after the movie will feel the life of the "family" very decent and proud and appreciate the efforts of receiving countries.

How to begin to say anything? It's no small matter, provided you have decided to not waste the time that has been given you, which is a great gift, being there. And how to speak words that get to the crux without reducing? This is all there is to it, though we cloud and clutter it with all sorts of obligatory hierarchies and narratives, in both life and film. There are several things I move past here. The camera is a bit more garish than I'm drawn to, the strands of plot also. I am not instantly bowled over by any predilections of 'showing life' or confronting 'issues', life is a vast surge to set before you any aim of 'capturing'. The language is Bresson's essentially, punctured by loud interludes, neon bunny ears and disheveled shawls that belie sex that was just had. But it gets to the crux in two important ways. The filmmaker could have plainly chosen to show us - like Spielberg would - a loving ordinary family forced to flee horrors. He makes it a point instead to show us a woman picking up an orphan girl among many in a camp and being paired with a stranger to create the needed family, given fake passports to be on their way to Europe. It's not because he thinks refugees are 'phony' that he does this, it seems rather out of desire to portray a reality that can be this complex and demands our response. We are better off facing a story like Dheepan's rather than lulling ourselves to sleep with platitudes that airbrush humanity for salon discussions.Once in France, it becomes strangely watchable as we navigate the difficulties of having to make sense but any other film on the subject could trot out much the same 'fish out of water' scenario. We do see how, one warzone left behind, another greets them on their doorstep. We do see how the war surges up again in the man as response, life having that quality of conjuring itself up again. Dheepan's Buddhist neighbors would know this as karma.But the other thing I like is that we have these people, engaged as characters in a fiction of husband and wife, pushing against limits to know truth. He gives us undecided people with urges, which is an accomplishment. Indeed the larger consciousness that moves the story is after Cassavetes, made more apparent with the shift ahead to London that finally plucks waking truth from the murk of roles and anxieties. Truth after all is something that you go out there and make happen , by going hard for her in this case.