‘How strange, like being at the movies,’ Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) remarks to Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan, Sengadal) as the pair peer out of the window of their makeshift Parisian apartment. The courtyard below their housing project home seethes with the sights and sounds of drug dealing, violence and other gang activity, with the new caretaker, his supposed wife and nine-year-old Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) forced to watch on. While their view may be far removed from the confines of a cinema, witnessing the scene before them still transports the Sri Lankan asylum-seekers to another world in the same manner as film-going. Looking on, they’re equally starkly aware of the distance they’ve travelled from their conflict-riddled homeland, and unable to shake the similarities between their troubled places of residence, both old and new.
Indeed, the fresh hope France once heralded proves fragile for Yalini, Dheepan and Illayaal as they cling to dreams of a better future, but find the chasm between their desire and reality difficult to reconcile. The heightened, movie-like antics that surround them clash with their expectations, yet mirror the falsities in their own status. Though posing as a family, the trio are bonded by necessity rather than blood. Everyone plays their part; however as Yalini becomes a carer while dreaming of escaping to London, Dheepan diligently endeavours to fulfil his janitorial duties but can’t shake his Tamil Tigers past, and Illayaal finds attending school stressful, they each struggle with their roles.
In Dheepan, action is hard — but simply observing is just as harrowing. Like A Prophet and Rust and Bone before it, Jacques Audiard’s latest film dedicates its focus to people torn between deeds and detachment, and exists in the space between the two as a result. Though his style is patient, drenched with realism and mimics his protagonists’ preference to watch rather than act, his frames are filled with incendiary moments. In a stately paced effort co-scripted with Thomas Bidegain (The Bélier Family) and Noé Debré (Through the Air), drama explodes in fits and spurts — a heated exchange here, a new threat there — leaving little doubt that the characters will do the same.
That sense of inevitability, coupled with a potent but overdone finale, tempers what otherwise remains a perceptive and empathetic look not only at the refugee, immigrant and integration experience in general, but at those attempting to survive Sri Lanka’s specific circumstances. While Audiard’s feature bears his protagonist’s moniker, the writer/director could also have named it for his lead actor, so heavy is the imprint of Jesuthasan’s own background upon the movie. Appropriately, the former real-life child soldier and fighter turned novelist and activist is Dheepan‘s most compelling presence. Infecting every scene with weariness and wisdom that can only stem from authenticity, he exudes the pain of his predicament, as delicately teased out in his interactions with newcomers Srinivasan and Vinasithamby, and boldly displayed as the film steps into more blatant, genre-fuelled territory.
His importance can’t be underestimated, not just to the narrative, but to the 2015 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner’s overall impact. In an offering that keeps its gaze simultaneously global and local, ponders both the personal and political, and is steeped in the intersection of perception and actuality, it is Jesuthasan that makes each extreme resonate. Audiard may be the feature’s most famous figure, yet his lead actor is its undoubted star. Inhabiting the part of a man caught in the middle of conflicting forces, when he’s on screen, everything feels more urgent and intimate than merely watching fact and fiction collide in a movie.
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Dheepan
Director: Jacques Audiard
France, 2015, 115 mins
Distributor: Transmission
General release date: TBC
Rating: MA
Alliance Francaise French Film Festival
Sydney: 1 – 24 March
Melbourne: 2 – 24 March
Canberra: 3 – 24 March
Brisbane: 11 March – 12 April
Perth: 16 March – 7 April
Adelaide: 31 March – 24 April
Casula: 7 – 10 April
Parramatta: 7 – 10 April
Hobart: 28 April – 4 May
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