Jacques Audiard, who won the Cesar, and the Grand Prix at Cannes, for 2010’s A Prophet, works on the fringes of society. He’s interested in what gives the people on the very edge the identity and sense of community they need to live, to survive at all.
Dheepan is the story of a defeated Tamil Tiger fighter, played by the former Tamil Tiger Antonythasan Jesuthasan, who has become an acclaimed writer in France.
Fleeing the war in Sri Lanka, in which his family has been killed, Dheepan takes up with a woman he doesn’t know at all, Yalini (a debut role for Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and a nine-year-old orphan girl Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) selected at random in a refugee camp, so they can masquerade as a family and use falsified passports to get to Europe. They end up in a crummy flat in an horrific housing estate in northern France, dominated by a threatening drugs gang.
Dheepan is given the job of being the caretaker of his block and works diligently. But when an exiled Tamil commander insists that the former fighter find money to buy weapons to continue the struggle, he refuses and is beaten. And when one mainly white gang raids the big one on the estate, mainly black, there’s a protracted gunfight. Illayaal is traumatized and Yalini wants to set off straightaway for England.
Dheepan, who has begun to care deeply for Yalini, has the terrible idea of drawing a thick white line between the warring blocks on the estate and proclaiming it a “no-fire zone” all by himself. Can they survive together?
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Dheepan, spoken mostly in Tamil, is filmed in the terrific immersive manner that made A Prophet such an exciting watch. The under-stated acting from all three main characters is superbly convincing — and it goes straight to the heart of the immigrant crisis affecting all Europe. Passionate, intensely focused, first-rate film-making, in other words.
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