Cannes Film Review: The Wandering Dipan
Translation & Proofreading A Nuan, 12
Indiwire Rating: A-
Over the past decade, Jacques Odia has successfully made the leap to become one of the most widely known and outstanding French directors of our time. In 2001, he gained international attention with "Lip Talk Horror", and in 2005, he filmed the remarkable "Rhythm of My Heart's Forgetting". But it was the 2009 prison epic "The Prophet" that made him truly famous around the world, and the film was not only nominated for an Oscar, but also won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.
2012's Rust and Bones is still rave reviews, winning awards and gaining a wider audience due to the addition of popular superstar Marion Cordia. However, the director's new work this time has some traceability: a small-budget film, a group of eighteen-line actors, and a new theme. So its success may not be accidental, it is a well-deserved masterpiece and one of Odia's most powerful works to date, maintaining his usual high standards but without the flaws of the past. Maybe the last few minutes of the film will be a different story, but let's start at the beginning.
The film was co-written by Jacques Odia, Noé Debré and Thomas Berghorn, who also worked with directors on "The Prophet" and "Rust and Bone". The story begins in Sri Lanka, where a woman named Yaliaswari Srinivasan seeks shelter for a young orphan girl, Ilia (Claudine Vinasithamby). They found an almost unsatisfactory man and got a new passport, and the three of them sailed to France together. They are all Tamils, a minority living in Sri Lanka who have fought for independence in the past, but their struggle was defeated in 2009. The man, now known as Dipan (Antonythasan Jesuthasa), is a very good veteran who was formerly employed by the Tamil Tigers.
The makeshift patchwork family was granted access to the shelter in France. Tormented by the war and the death of his wife and children, Di pan moved into a dilapidated residential area controlled by drug dealers and became a janitor. Yarini also finds a job here, where she takes care of and cooks for the disabled uncle of the local gang boss Brahim (Vincent Rothier), while Elia has to adjust to her studies at a new school in a foreign country. They all tried to look ahead and start a new life; but when the strife resumed, Dipan decided not to give in any longer.
Odia never hesitates to portray multiculturalism in his films, but "Wandering Dipan" is his first direct colonial experience, which also gives the film a new element. Sri Lanka appears very rarely in the film, but it is the protagonists' longing for it and their hopes for a new life that promote the development of the whole film, and when depicting this journey away from home, the film is also extremely detailed and sincere.
The title is actually a bit inaccurate, because the film focuses on the three protagonists, not just Dipan (unfortunately, although the newcomer actor who plays Elia is very good, she has less role in the second half), but because of the most painful past, Dipan is most eager to integrate into French culture. Yalini, on the other hand, is less willing, after all, she is only 26 years old, but suddenly she has an older fake husband and children, and she has to stumble to learn a new foreign language.
Both lead actors are excellent and relatively new to the screen: Jesuthasan, who plays Dipan, is a well-known writer, while Sriivasan, who plays Yalini, is the first drama actor to enter the big screen. Their slightly green performance seems to be an understated and colorful gesture, so that the film seems to have a vivid heartbeat. The section where fake dramas come true is easy to remind people of "American Spy Dream", but the love depicted in the film is even far more real and believable than "Rust and Bone". The film maintains both the original vitality of the Odia style and the most compassionate and humane of all his works.
The uproar after the premiere suggests that the last paragraph of the film is still controversial, that is, part of Di Pan's rebellion to protect his family, and the director chose a more habitual and conservative shooting method. I don't have much of a problem with this, after all, this turn is not too abrupt. As the film draws to a close, the tension grows, and Deepan's decision to rise to the rescue of the temporary family (even though they may not need help) is not unreasonable, as he has lost his wife and children but is powerless. Perhaps Odia's approach to filming is a little too extreme, which is why these controversies are caused, but this is still appropriate for the film and the characters themselves: Di Pan escapes from one battlefield, turns around and steps into another; and the visual impact of this scene also makes the audience feel more empathy for the move. Of course, despite this, I also admit that the ending part is the biggest failure of the whole film, it is too neat and does not look at all careless.
In addition, the film is visually and sound-sounding. Emerging cinematographer Eponine Momenceau contributed some of the most memorable film scenes of this year's Cannes, and the soundtrack of electronic musician Nicolas Jaar is equally remarkable. This is Odia's culmination, abandoning the overly aggressive mannerism of Rust and Bone in search of digging deeper into the hearts of the characters and opting for a highly human, even warm,corpus worldview, and we are greeted with this work that shines in Cannes this year.