• 1 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against (...)
• 2 Ibid. 1299.

2Kimberlé Crenshaw formulated intersectional analysis some thirty years ago, to correct for critics’ tendency to focus on either gender or race when describing a subject’s identity and experience. The condition of white women, she warned, had been allowed to stand in for that of all women, and the experiences of all Black people were being subsumed to those of Black men. This way of thinking did not simply “fail women of color” by obscuring how race or patriarchy shaped their lives but reinforced subordination by foreclosing remedy for the complexity of lived experience.1 What was needed, Crenshaw concluded, were more sensitive analyses that did not simply add race and gender but better suggested how specific identities and particular liabilities are forged by “the intersection of multiple dimensions.”2

• 3 Athena Mutua, “Multidimensionality Is to Masculinities What Intersectionality Is to Feminism.” Neva (...)
• 4 Devon W. Carbado, “Colorblind Intersectionality,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (...)
• 5 Carbado, ibid. 823. See also: Richard Dyer, White: Twentieth Anniversary Edition. 2nd ed. (Florence (...)
• 6 Andrea Waling, “Rethinking Masculinity Studies: Feminism, Masculinity, and Poststructural Accounts (...)

3In the decades since Crenshaw published her foundational essays, others have elaborated. Athena Mutua addressed the condition of men who are not white, able-bodied, cisgender, and/or heterosexual, to highlight differential masculine relations to power and privilege.3 Devon Carbado argued that intersectional analysis should examine “social categories that are ostensibly beyond [its] theoretical reach and normative concern,” including whiteness.4 Building on the work of Richard Dyer, Carbado insists that the failure to name whiteness as a racial identity reinforces hierarchy by making it the “the natural and unmarked racial backdrop for other social positions,”5 Andrea Waling and others have suggested how intersectionality may take us beyond the fixed identities of R.W. Connell’s “hegemonic masculinity” to deepen thinking about how individual men accommodate, appropriate, and resist gendered constructs.6

• 7 Audiard’s first film, Regarde les hommes tomber/ See How They Fall (1994) is his only exclusively h (...)

4This broad and varied body of literature offers useful tools for excavating notions of gender and race embedded in Jacques Audiard’s work. Certainly, gender has long been the most useful category of analysis for his films, which depict men wrestling with homosociability, filial duty, and estranging expressions of violence. Audiard typically joins those men with individual women or a promise of heterosexual love, either or both of which ultimately rein in their violence. Although few of his films are exclusively male and several include complex female characters, only recently has Audiard begun to shift responsibility for the taming of violence from women to men. In so doing, he produces more nuanced accounts of gender relations.7

• 8 Julien Allen, “A Prophet.” Reverse Shot (Feb 24, 2010), en ligne [consulted 31 May 2021]; Maria Lof (...)

5At the same time, race has become increasingly important in Audiard’s work. Un Prophète (2009) is rightly lauded for its bold critique of French anti-Arab sentiment and Dheepan for its affirmation of multicultural identity.8 And yet, Dheepan and Audiard’s next film, The Sisters Brothers, complicate the progressive tendencies of his work. Both films are less concerned with depicting men trapped in violent conflict until women tame them than with constructing male characters capable of forging new identities through inner struggle or in negotiation with other men. And both films have Brown protagonists who are clearly heroes. At the same time, however, both films subtly distance their heroes of color from authority for violence and so rob them of the normative (white) masculinity that dominates Audiard’s work, raising troubling questions about how audiences are meant to understand non-whiteness.

• 9 The complexity of female characters in Dheepan recalls the remarkable women of Sur mes lèvres and D (...)
• 10 Jonathan Romney, “Jacques Audiard: ‘I wanted to give migrants a name, a shape… a violence of their (...)

7Audiard’s films almost inevitably accord women vital roles in redeeming the male protagonists. Dheepan gestures to that familiar dynamic but is equally interested in how a man transforms himself. It advances on earlier Audiard films Un Prophète or De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté—also concerned with men who transform themselves-- by crafting female characters who have rich inner lives and experience change independently of the hero.9 The adult Yalini moves from self-absorption to affection for Dheepan and Illayaal while negotiating the codes of a new country and a complex relationship with the handsome, menacing man she meets through her work as a care-giver. Illayaal’s experience is still more empathetically rendered as she carries the immigrant child’s burden of translating languages and cultures for the adults around her. But this is Dheepan’s story and, through him, Audiard elaborates a complex vision of masculine identity. The director has said he wanted to make visible the memory of violence that many refugees carry with them and he does so by crafting a protagonist determined to resurrect who he was before war and exile.10 Dheepan recovers his sophisticated mechanical skills to repair the banlieue buildings where he works as a groundskeeper and he comes to honor the memory of the wife and children he lost in wartime. Most importantly, we see a man who does not depend on a good woman to redeem him. Rather, Dheepan struggles to heal himself privately, making imperfect but steady progress by retreating to a basement workshop to hone his skills and manage the rage that rises when he experiences reversal and renewed violence.

• 11 Özlem Köksal & Ipek A Çelik Rappas (2019) “A Hand that Holds a Machete,” Third Text 33 no.2, 256-26 (...)

9Because Dheepan is not concerned with the colonial background or international context of the Sri Lankan civil war, the family’s arrival in the troubled banlieue links this French space to a country already figured as primitive and chaotic.11 The prologue is brief but evocative: bloodied bodies piled and burned; a dusty, crowded refugee camp; the rushed nighttime boarding of a refugee boat. Audiard joins that setting to the banlieue with a South Asian inflected soundtrack of sitar, tabla, and Indian flute that accompanies the camera as it follows Dheepan across the green before rising slowly above building rooftops to gaze at the world beyond. (42:08-43:17) Later, Yalini—having watched the former soldier Dheepan socialize with drug dealers—asks if they are going to be his new army. (1:25:36-1:25:58) The movie closes the circle between lawless banlieue and savage Global South most firmly when Dheepan responds to a nascent drug war by painting a white line down the middle of the quad and declaring his side a “no fire zone.” (1:22:42-1:24:20). This banlieue is no safe harbor but a resurrection of all that Dheepan, Yalini, and Ilayaal fled.

• 12 David Simon, The Wire (HBO Cable Television, 2002-2008).

10The film’s peculiar representations of the links between race and violence make most clear its conflicted understanding of men of color. Initially, it seems that Black and Brown men are the principal source of lawlessness and violence in Le Pré. Men of color lounge on couches in a building lobby, awaiting drug customers like characters from the American series The Wire.12 When one of the few white men among them explains to Dheepan that he was recruited from an isolated rural town to lend a hand, the statement does not so much advance the narrative as echo right-wing charges that Black and Brown banlieues are corrupting a white France profonde. (51:27-52:05) The sense of menace deepens when Yalini climbs to the apartment where she will care for a retired drug lord. Gloom and shots focused tightly on her shadowed face convey her anxious disorientation as hip-hop booms from afar and two Black faces emerge silently in a doorway. (fig. 1) She continues to climb, passing more strangers of color whose indifference suggests their ownership of the place. (fig. 2) The last figure is a guard dog whose bark and sudden appearance in a pool of light causes Yalini to briefly lose her way. (33:03-33:50)

• 13 Audiard’s most recent film, Les Olympiades, has no bloodshed beyond a quick punch delivered by a wo (...)
• 14 Köksal & Rappas, p. 263.

12Having given authority for Le Pré’s generalized violence to someone white, Audiard represents Dheepan’s authority for his own violence in still more complicated ways. As in most Audiard films, Dheepan includes a penultimate sequence of blood-letting that catalyzes the hero, sending him toward peace. The cause of bloodletting in this film is an escalating drug war.13 Rivals murder M. Habib and mortally wound Brahim while Yalini is in their apartment. After Brahim puts a gun to Yalini’s head and demands that she call Dheepan to rescue them, the latter must fight his way past a multitude of armed guards. The explosion begins with a machete attack which, Özlem Köksal and Ipek A Çelik Rappas persuasively argue, links war-torn Global South to an otherwise peaceful North by “recall[ing] tribal violence.”14 When Dheepan abandons the primitive machete for one of his enemies’ guns, Audiard returns to the tight angles and obscurity with which he earlier captured Yalini’s anxiety, using it now to divorce Dheepan from his actions. Disembodied parts of Dheepan’s body are visible as diegetic sounds of gunfire and shells dropping on the concrete stairs ring out. Brief flashes of light indicate shots fired and barely visible figures fall heavily to the floor. (1:43:28-1:45:36) By fragmenting and obscuring the gunplay, Audiard attenuates Dheepan’s responsibility for it: these are acts to which he has been forced and with which he has no direct visual association. (fig. 4) To make this attenuation more clear, consider the brutally intimate depiction of the hero Tom’s fight with a Russian gangster in De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (2005). There, every blow is visible, every gasp and cry audible as the two men wrestle and pound one another. (1:38:10-1:39:10) (fig. 5) The latter scene is more consistent with Audiard’s representational strategies, which often aestheticize violence but rarely hide it.

• 15 Compare, for example, Dheepan’s allusions to wartime violence with the bare-knuckle fighting of Du (...)
• 16 By contrast with Dheepan, the violence exercised in De battre mon coeur takes place out of women’s (...)

14With Dheepan Audiard advances on themes that have long interested him. Setting aside his preferred genre of the polar to adopt a kind of social realism for much of the film, he better highlights the genuine costs of violence.15 Crafting realistic female characters, he makes more palpable the impact of rough masculinity on women and men alike.16 What remains relatively constant, however, is that the promise of heterosexual love finally resolves the masculine inclination to violence: the film ends with a close-up on Yalini’s fingers, tenderly playing with Dheepan’s hair as they sit among family and friends. The trading of violence for a woman’s love is a perilous— and admittedly tired— narrative strategy. And yet, progress there is on gender because Dheepan so purposefully acts to reform himself. The Sister’s Brothers goes further still by banishing the redemptrice entirely. But racial hierarchy endures.

• 17 Richard Slotkin, “Violence,” Ed Buscombe (ed) BFI Companion to the Western. London: Andre Deutsch ( (...)

15The Sisters Brothers (2018), adapted from a novel by Patrick Dewitt, gave Audiard two firsts: the making of a Western and an English-language film. It is a tale of two siblings who work as professional killers for a shadowy figure named “the Commodore,” but who regard violence very differently. Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix) is a drunken sociopath who wants nothing more than to continue killing. His older brother, Eli (John C. Reilly), longs for good conversation and a peaceful life. If dividing outright violence and ambivalence about it between two characters is unusual– Audiard more often combines those qualities in a single figure– the movie’s most novel feature is the absence of a civilizing woman. That omission simultaneously marks a departure from Audiard’s regular practice and from the classical Western, which regularly pits a woman who stands in for society against the lone gunslinger.17 In The Sisters Brothers, a man catalyzes the repudiation of violence.

• 18 It may be objected that Malik, in Un Prophète, makes his own way. But he leaves prison to join the (...)

18For the first time in more than a half-dozen films, Audiard’s men have mastered their own violence without womanly presence or intervention.18 Charlie is undone by his own excess, but it is Warm who liberates Morris and Eli by encouraging them talk and relinquish their regrets about the past. After a few gently searching conversations, Warm’s status is cemented as the four wait to pain for gold. The camera lingers on his face, lit by campfire with a half-smile that affirms his enduring friendship with Morris. (1:29:26-1:29:40) (fig. 6)

• 19 “John C. Reilly and Riz Ahmed on subverting expectations in The Sisters Brothers,” Variety [en lign (...)
• 20 According to The Guardian, one in four cowboys in the American West was Black, but the Western rema (...)

19Nonetheless, just as casting a white man to play Brahim in Dheepan complicated the racial politics of that film, so casting a Brown man to play Warm complicates representation in The Sisters Brothers. The movie initially hews to the classical Western by placing white men front and center. The brothers and the men they kill, as well as the Commodore and the tracker John Morris, are all white. But Herman Kermit Warm is played by British actor Riz Ahmed, who is of Pakistani descent and visibly Brown. That the character should be played by a person of color was the filmmakers’ choice. Patrick DeWitt’s novel says nothing of Warm’s complexion, but a reader might reasonably assume that a character described as being of German descent and sporting a red beard, is white. No one in the film speaks directly of Warm’s race but several characters describe him, independently of one another, as having dark skin. (0:12:53, 0:43:40, 0:44:19) In interviews about the film, actor John C. Reilly, who optioned DeWitt’s book for the film and plays Eli, and Riz Ahmed describe the latter’s casting as a way to remind viewers of the racial heterogeneity of the American west.19 That choice, which remains shockingly rare in American and European films, is important.20 But even as The Sisters Brothers fosters a more racially varied—and accordingly more accurate—vision of the past, its narrative sustains racial hierarchy in its representation of violence.

• 21 Audiard’s reflection on masculinity and race continues develop, as his latest film, Les Olympiades (...)

23Certainly, Dheepan and The Sisters Brothers celebrate Brown men, but they intimate that such men can only be heroes if they are not fully responsible for violence in which they may share. This stands in marked contrast to Audiard’s larger body of work, which elicits sympathy for white men wracked by violence and insists that such figures are redeemable. Can that kind of moral generosity be extended to men of color? Can Brown or Black men become heroes only if they are already exceptional in being more upright and less violent than those around them?21 If violence reflects power in the worlds constructed by these films, we must ask just how much power a man of color may be allowed before white audiences cease to sympathize.

• 22 Jason Solomons, “Interview: Jacques Audiard,” The Guardian, 5 December 2009 [en ligne]. Consulted 6 (...)

24These are questions worth posing. Jacques Audiard is transparent about his determination to upset audience expectations of racial identity. Of Un Prophète, he said that French audiences are “not used to seeing Arabs come out on top and they don't like it,” and added: “Good. I hope it pisses them off. That's the point."22 Dheepan and The Sisters Brothers raise the question of how much further he may yet go. For that is ultimately the point. Movies both express and reinforce common ideas about gender, race, power, and redemption, quite often in ways that are not readily apparent. Thus, each and every image that depicts a Brown or Black man as “good” or “bad” matters very much indeed.