Dheepan
Director: Jacques Audiard
Talent: Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby, Vincent Rottiers
Release Date: 8th April 2016
In one way the 2015 winner of the Palme D’Or seems to be drawing on a purely topical, ripped-straight-from-your-newsfeed storyline. Dheepan follows a Tamil Tiger soldier of the same name who, after the loss of a bloody civil war, hitches up with a young woman and orphaned child to pose as a refugee family in order to escape Sri Lanka.
But the film’s focus is not on providing a realist portrait of the experience of refugees in Europe. Instead it develops into a determined character study of the survivors of war – the veteran soldier who knows only battle, the young woman robbed of a true childhood, the orphaned child with just enough innocence left to hope for something better – and explores these familiar cinematic themes through the fresh eyes of non-white, non-western protagonists.
When Dheepan and his new, fake family arrive in Paris, they wind up living in a gangster-controlled slum. There the former soldier finds works as a janitor, observing the movements of drug dealers populating the building he is tasked with maintaining with a tough, stoic resolve that wouldn’t look out of place on Charles Bronson.
Although they’re operating in a language and culture he can’t fully grasp, it doesn’t take long for Dheepan to see these wannabe tough guys as the cannon fodder they are, even if they don’t realise it themselves. The film oozes slowly mounting tension as we are gradually made aware that the hastily assembled new family are on the sidelines of yet another potential conflict.
The struggle presented to Dheepan’s characters isn’t to assimilate to a new culture, but to do so in a way that allows a true fresh start, leaving the old war behind without getting dragged into a new one. And maybe it’s in this metaphor that director Jacques Audiard is in fact saying something significant about the psychology of the refugee experience after all.
Words: Bernard O’Rourke
