Dheepan tells the story of the Tamil Tiger fighter of that name who is played by Jesuthasan Antonythasan, who is an author, activist and former Tamil Tiger in real life. Dheepan leaves Sri Lanka in the closing days of that country’s Civil War which raged between 1983-2009, although ethnic tensions have continued afterwards. Turning his back on violent struggle in the aftermath of yet another massacre, he links up with a young woman named Yaliani (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), previously unknown to him.
She is looking after a nine-year-old girl Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) who has lost her mother in the conflict. All three pretend to be a bona fide family to gain visas allowing them to travel to France to begin a new life. In fact, Dheepan is given the passport of a man who lost his life six months previously.
After desperate early days hawking light-up toys and baubles as an illegal street trader in Paris, Dheepan secures a job as caretaker at a flats complex ruled by drug gang thugs. Yaliani finds a job looking after a sick relative of one of the gang members in one of the flats.
Meanwhile, Illayaal is placed in a Special Needs class at a local school because of her lack of French. Excluded from her classmates’ play, her prospects are as poor as those of Dheepan and Yaliani who, out of natural moral responsibility, become her adoptive parents. Notwithstanding their own frustrations and battles, if they don’t become her guardians she will simply have no one to look after her.
Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) and Deephan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) in Dheepan
Tension simmers throughout the claustrophobic tower blocks as rival drug gangs go on the rampage. Dheepan decides to take the law into his hands after a dangerous gun battle pushes him over the brink, back in fact into the war tactics of the Tamil Tiger he was. Surprisingly enough, the result is not quite the tragedy his foolhardy actions seem to portend.
Dheepan has all the elements of a decent film, but somehow it is presented in overly-melodramatic terms, a charge indeed which one might also meekly lay at Audiard’s previous film, Rust and Bone. The movie is just too intent on keeping too many pots on the boil, too directed at making us nervous at just about every frame, with only the odd interlude of sensual abandon or room for reflection.
Jesuthasan Antonythasan plays the former Tamil Tiger Dheepan trying to put the past behind him with a fresh start in a run-down Paris suburb
If only the director had used that huge elephant a bit more, that great hulking creature which is seen from time to time, lurking amidst darkly shadowed leaves, an adored divinity back in Sri Lanka. But so intent was Audiard on making what is in effect a French action film with subtitles that the potential for a richer, more contemplative film was sidelined. Only mildly satisfactory.
Paddy Kehoe
