Cannes winner ‘Dheepan’ timely refugee tale

French director Jacques Audiard is a curious combination of art-house auteur and genre filmmaker, a brazen showman and gritty naturalist. He makes tender and brutal movies that recast themselves as they twist their way toward unpredictable finales. To suit tales of transformation (his specialty), he switches genres midmovie like a character changing wardrobe.

In “Dheepan,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year, he travels from war movie to migrant drama to film noir, adding an atypically happy ending, to boot. Audiard’s restless shifts can be jarring, but the intensity of his film doesn’t waver; the power of “Dheepan” is in its volatility.

It begins in fire. Fleeting scenes capture a burning Sri Lankan village in the bloody, disorienting aftermath of civil war. To gain asylum, a rebel fighter (played by Jesuthasan Antonythasan) who, having lost his family in the war, cobbles together a pseudo family.

At a refugee camp, he picks a woman, Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and an orphaned 9-year-old girl, Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) to pose as his family. “Dheepan” becomes his new name, taking the identity and passport of a dead man.

Borders change, but the threat of violence merely mutates. Placed in a tenement block in Paris’ banlieues, Dheepan warily eyes the drug-dealing gang members that patrol the apartment building roofs and clog the stairwells.

He gains a foothold as a caretaker of the tenement and Yalini, slower to adjust, finds a job caring for the father of an imprisoned gang lieutenant.

They tersely, awkwardly begin becoming more authentically a family. But pressure around them is gradually growing, not just in altercations with the gang but Dheepan’s soldier past catches up with him through other Sri Lankan refugees.

It goes without saying that a film about the dislocation and confusion of refugees in poor Europe neighborhoods is strikingly timely.