‘Dheepan’ timely refugee thriller – Reiner, son explore dark time in ‘Being Charlie’

This news has been read 3900 times!

NEW YORK, May 5, (AP): 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 mid-movie 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, himself a former Tamil Tiger child soldier turned acclaimed writer in France) 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. When she tries to gauge the level of fearsomeness the local gangs deserves, she wonders if they’re like those in Sri Lanka. Dheepan replies, “Sort of, but less dangerous.”

Family

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. The film has undeniable political relevance to France’s immigrant policies, but it’s not quite a social issues film.

Audiard has said “Dheepan” was inspired by Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” (1971) and his focus on Sri Lankan immigrants was chosen largely for narrative purposes. But the movie is deeply invested in understanding the lives of migrants trying to recalibrate on the margins of a foreign society.

Some have mourned the film’s late, explosive turn into thriller territory and been befuddled by its dream-like epilogue. But for Audiard, whose “Rust and Bone” chronicled the revival of a badly injured killer-whale trainer depicted a small-time criminal’s rise in a prison’s Corsican mob, rebirth is a mean and messy business. But it’s also beautiful.

“Dheepan”, an IFC release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for “violence, language and brief sexuality/nudity.” Running time: 115 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

“I maybe didn’t handle it the best way”, said Rob Reiner of his son’s struggles with drugs.

It’s a story that stayed out of the tabloids while it was happening, but by the time Nick Reiner was 18 years old, he had already cycled in and out of nine treatment facilities with bouts of homelessness and relapses in between.

“I listened to a lot of people who had a desk and a diploma”, Rob Reiner said. “I didn’t really think about my kid and what he needed”.

Seated in a leather armchair in a cozy corner of his West Hollywood office on a recent afternoon, Rob Reiner spoke candidly about that difficult time. He’s had a few years now to process what he and his family went through. Now, Rob and Nick Reiner explore the ordeal in the semi-autobiographical film “Being Charlie”, out in limited release Friday.

The idea for a film had crossed Rob Reiner’s mind but for many reasons it wasn’t something he could handle in the moment. Unbeknownst to him, his son had been working on something about the absurdities of his experience with a friend, Matt Elisofon, who he met at a treatment center.

Guidance

With Rob Reiner’s eventual guidance, the two friends’ script evolved from a half-hour rehab comedy into “Being Charlie”, a more dramatic and truthful rendering of a teenage boy’s issues with drugs, rehab and a famous father that takes into account the parents’ side of things, too. “Jurassic World’s” Nick Robinson stars as the disaffected, searching kid at the center.

“Being Charlie” is not solely Nick and Rob Reiner’s story, but there are details scattered throughout. In the film, the father, a movie star with political ambitions played by Cary Elwes (working with Rob Reiner for the first time since “The Princess Bride”) says the thing about desks and diplomas, for instance. The ending, too, changed repeatedly during production as the Reiners’ relationship evolved.

“We didn’t go into it thinking this is going to be therapeutic or bring us closer, but it did come out that way,” Rob Reiner said. “It forced us to understand ourselves better than we had. I told Nick while we were making it, I said, ‘you know it doesn’t matter, whatever happens to this thing, we won already. This has already been good.’ We’ve worked through a lot of stuff.”

It’s a reflective time for Rob Reiner, who just turned 69 in March but is already saying he’s “almost 70”. While he’s still “Meathead” from TV’s “All In the Family” to many boomers, younger generations see him more as the director of a handful of now-classic movies.

The offices of his Castle Rock independent production company are inhabited by posters, photos and trinkets from his half century in the business, like a worn scrapbook of photos from “The Princess Bride” casually displayed on the coffee table.

“You live a life and you start to think, what are the things you’ve thought about over the course of your life? If you still have the energy and the ability to do it, then you find ways to do it as long as you can do it,” Rob Reiner said. “I mean, look at Clint Eastwood!”

And he’s staying active in the industry, even if the landscape of how films get made has changed drastically.

This news has been read 3900 times!