Deeply moving film about immigration and love with a violent backdrop.
Dheepan
Grade: A-
Director: Jacques Audiard (A Prophet)
Screenplay: Audiard, Thomas Bidegain (Through the Air), Noe Debre
Cast: Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan
Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hr 55 min
by John DeSando
“Men and women are immigrants in each other's worlds.” Yakov Smirnoff
While the media is awash with stories of displaced persons, especially in Europe and Asia, the engrossing film, Dheepan, depicts the struggles of a small “family” from Sri Lanka that could as easily stand for emigrations anywhere. The titular hero (played by Jesuthasan Antonythasan) is a former Tamil Tiger trying to leave his violent past by emigrating first to France, then to England.
The fact that the 1983-2009 Sri Lankan civil war is closing, with Tamil losing, helps to propel the story and give credence to his flight. The story is fascinating as Dheepan joins with a woman and a young girl, both previously unknown to him, to leave the country seeming to be a family. Just watching the three maneuver themselves out of India to a Parisian suburb is drama enough, but writer-director Jacques Audiard carefully shows how the new family gradually becomes a functioning, loving trio.
However, it’s not at all easy as Dheepan's new job is as caretaker for a housing complex that has a drug operation as a main part of it. Although he tries to stay out of the way, the old Tiger surfaces, and he must fight for his independence as well as the trust and safety of his "wife."
That fight for family love and survival becomes just as compelling as the struggle of the Tamil Tigers for independence in Northern Sri Lanka. What makes this Cannes Palme d’Or winner so emotionally magnetizing is the quiet way the characters grab hold of your affection, in a sense worming their way into your heart because of the sincerity of their purpose and the charisma of the actors.
Besides the microcosmic attachment to the family in progress, the story, again quietly, references ethnic challenges worldwide as Yalini dons a headscarf to fit into the predominantly Muslim population, an artifice similar to her faking being wife to Dheepan and mother to Illavaal (Claudine Vinasithamby). Yet there is nothing deceptive about the power of this story to make universal the need to find a home, and the concomitant importance of a nurturing love.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
