The
26-year civil war in Sri Lanka (1983-2009), a
conflict between the mainly Buddhist Sinhalese
majority and the Hindu Tamil minority in which
200,000 people were killed, including tens of
thousands of Tamil civilians forms the backdrop
for French director Jacques Audiard’s searing
refugee drama Dheepan. Winner of the Palme d’Or
at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, it is the
story of three Tamil immigrants from Sri Lanka
newly settled in Paris, their adjustment to an
often unwelcoming environment, and the bond they
form based on mutual need and acceptance of the
others pain.
Like Audiard’s previous film, Rust and Bone, it
is raw and visceral, yet also a film of lyricism
and sensitivity. Though the film seems to draw a
parallel between the war in Sri Lanka and social
unrest in France, it is a fictional film and,
according to Audiard, is not intended to mirror
the actual conditions of refugees in France
which he believes has been mostly welcoming.
Written by Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré
and photographed by Eponine Momenceau, the film
opens in Sri Lanka as the Tamil fighter Dheepan
(Antonythasan Jesuthasan, a novelist and a
former Tamil Tiger himself), whose cause faces
defeat, lays palm leaves across the corpses on a
funeral pyre before burning his own military
fatigues.
The scene shifts to Yalini (Kalieaswari
Srinivasan), a young woman attempting to ensure
her passage out of the country by finding a
young girl to pose as her daughter, She finds
Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), a girl who can
pass for nine, and takes her to where Dheepan
(an assumed name) is being given the passports
of three dead people. Assuming new identities,
the three pretend to be a family escaping
persecution in Sri Lanka and are relocated to
France where they are employed as caretakers of
a housing project in the Paris suburbs. It is a
locale reminiscent of the projects in Mathieu
Kassovitz’, La Haine, where drug dealing and
urban decay are pervasive.
Their guide Youssouf (Marc Zinga) gives them a
tour but the instructions, in a language they do
not understand, do not register. Youssouf skirts
around the problem of the drug dealers who
congregate in another block across the
courtyard, only telling him to wait until they
leave before beginning to clean. As Illayal goes
to school to learn French and Yalini is assigned
to cook and clean for an elderly man whose
nephew Brahim (Vincent Rottiers) is one of the
local gang leaders, the film traces the gradual
assimilation of the family, their overriding
desire for connection, not only to the language
and customs, but to each other. Though the film
is restrained with moments of tenderness and
humor as well as anger and frustration,
underneath there is a growing tension.
Violence erupts when Dheepan, who suffers from
PTSD, draws a white line across the courtyard
that they are not to cross and it has a jarring
effect though, to me, not out of sync with the
film’s setup and exploration of its characters.
Though Audiard claims that Dheepan is not
intended to be political, given the real-life
nature of the circumstances, it cannot help but
be just that. He said that he wanted “to give
the faceless a name, a face, a shape,” a story
of their own and he has succeeded. In making a
human document, he reminds us of the connection
we have with people around the world whose
voices we cannot hear, whose faces we cannot
see, and whose hands we may never touch.
GRADE: A-
Howard Schumann
