This week HeyUGuys is celebrating the work of French director Jacques Audiard. His latest film, Dheepan, opens in UK cinemas on the 8th of April, and today Brody Rossiter illuminates the themes of Audiard’s cinema.

“The cinema that interests me departs from realism”.

– Jacques Audiard

Jacques Audiard is one of France’s most revered contemporary directors for good reason. Even those unfamiliar with the more intricate mechanisms of world, specifically French, cinema will have most likely stumbled across the director’s work at some point or another thanks to a variety of informed sources and enthused word of mouth. The swathes of positive reviews and awards that consistently accompany his releases are complimented by the glowing recommendations of the many filmmakers guided by his cinematic tutorage and influence.

To those familiar with the auteur, it may seem strange that an introduction to his work and its many bruising yet contemplative nuances is still necessary for many film lovers out there.

It’s interesting to consider that escapism appeals to Audiard’s directorial sensitivities. Many would cite his work as distinctly “real”. Many would regard his tales as confrontational, perhaps even harrowing in their portrayal of characters’ perilous plights. Maybe Audiard considers the environments he constructs as exaggerated pseudo-realities that act as outward projections of characters’ inner-struggles. Perhaps he’s just more in tune with a world plagued by division and alienation than he’s willing to admit to himself.

a prophet

The auteur’s work carries several of the arthouse attributes that have become synonymous with modern French cinema; specifically, the bleak intensely personal melodrama that casts a dark, menacing cloud over depictions of the country’s increasingly detached and dislocated landscape. However, his compact narratives also bear the mark of classic American crime thrillers.

The director rarely meanders. He strives to kick down doors, situating his incendiary themes at the forefront of his films through visual fluidity and emotional resonance. His narratives are considered yet possess an immediacy that appeals to wider mainstream English-speaking audiences willing to overlook subtitles due to the fast-moving action depicted onscreen. His films may well be foreign, but they still feel incredibly accessible.

the-beat-that-my-heart-skipped-romain-duris-piano-jacques-audiard

2005’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped (a remake James Toback’s cult 1978 picture ‘Fingers’), highlighted Audiard’s flair for blazing violent and incendiary trails across the screen; passages underpinned by characters whose moody, hardboiled exteriors were gradually eroded to reveal sensitive and melancholic cores. Romain Duris’ Tom is must decide whether to follow in his father’s brutal crime lord footsteps or follow his dream to become a concert pianist.

After beginning an affair with his partner’s neglected wife and fellow musician, Miao Lin (her own inarticulacy explicitly highlighted by her inability to speak a word of French), they communicate through musical gestures and passionate interludes. Both are trapped by their interweaving lifestyles and circumstance, both find a momentary freedom, and most importantly, a voice, when sat together at a piano.

The burdens of a life of crime were once again explored by Audiard when he depicted life inside a French prison through the eyes of a young Muslim man. 2009’s A Prophet still stands as the director’s most uncompromising and vividly brutal statement. Incarceration presents itself in a variety of troubling manners. Physical bars are juxtaposed by institutional hierarchies. Bursts of violence contradict the mundanity of existing inside a cell. Violence becomes a tool of communication, brokering hostile takeovers and staking claims to fragile empires built upon corruption and vice.

a-prophet

Audiard’s yearning to provide immigrant communities with their own voice within his latest Palme d’Or winning picture, Dheepan, mirrors storytelling instincts presented throughout his career. While the physical and vocational makeup of his leading men and women varies greatly, their inarticulacy and frustrations closely resemble one another’s. A clear example of this literal and metaphorical inarticulacy can be found throughout his 2001 picture, Read My Lips.

Deaf secretary Carla (Emmanuelle Devos) is subjected to daily instances of abuse and bullying by her mean-spirited male colleagues. The suggestion that the young woman needs an assistant only delivers a further insult. However, when Paul (Vincent Cassel) an ex-con with experience only in being a thief applies for the role, her life immediately changes. Carla’s disability and subsequent ability to lip read become a means of freeing Paul and herself from the constraints of their upsetting lives by exploiting Paris’ seedy criminal underbelly. The pair must dive deeper into a dark ocean of criminality before breaking away from its powerful current.

read-my-lips

Dheepan presents the story of a former Sri Lankan Tamil fighter (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) who flees to France and ends up working as caretaker on the peripheries of Paris. Despite escaping the violence of his homeland alongside his family, the crime-filled tower blocks of the capital’s outskirts hold little respite from an existence punctuated with omnipresent fear and violence. Picture the restless ghettos of Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine, only with two more decades’ worth of alienation and division heaped on top of an already volatile portrait of life on the borders.

The peripheries are a good place to start when it comes to Audiard’s filmography and the characters contained within his collection of fractured narratives. The alienated and estranged course through the filmmaker’s works, often silently yet with an undeniable impact. The noirish conventions that Audiard holds so closely to his heart provide a visual accomplice to the complex and topical themes which bubble to an explosive boiling point. Disability, incarceration and geographic disruption wrap around Audiard’s narratives, gripping and shaping characters, before striking them with a closed fist. Individuals must fight to be heard, struggle to find their freedom and often communicate without words.

Perhaps Audiard isn’t talking about cinema which doesn’t deal in the “real”, but rather cinema which depicts individuals escaping from everyday realities. Whether you’re lost or just departing, Audiard’s cinema will hopefully help you find a voice with which you can ask for directions.

Audiard’s latest, Dheepan, is out in UK on the 8th of April.