Jacques Audiard (2015)
Dheepan is the identity of the main character in Jacques Audiard’s film, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes festival. Sivadhasan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) is a Tamil Tiger, on the losing side at the end of the long-running Sri Lankan civil war in 2009. In a refugee camp, he decides he wants to make a new life in France. In order to secure political asylum, he is given the passport of a dead man, whose name was Dheepan. Sivadhasan/Dheepan is joined on his boat journey to Europe by two other refugees – a woman, Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), and an orphaned nine-year-old girl, Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby). They are strangers to each other and to Dheepan but the cover story for the immigration authorities will be that this threesome are husband, wife and child. The newly-created family finds accommodation in a housing project in the suburbs of Paris. Dheepan gets a job as resident caretaker; Yalini cooks and cleans for an elderly invalid man in the building where they live; Illayaal starts school. The housing project is, as a result of racial tensions and drugs-related violence, a frightening place. Dheepan, Yalini and Illayaal find they have, in effect, exchanged one war zone for another.
Jacques Audiard wrote the screenplay with Thomas Bidegain (who also worked with him on A Prophet and Rust and Bone) and Noé Debré. Audiard concentrates increasingly on the cultural clashes, the gang warfare, the terrifying insecurity of life in the housing project. This makes Dheepan an experience both gruelling and hard to argue with – yet I was sorry Audiard, with his strong track record in wide-ranging humanist drama, didn’t explore in more detail the development of the central relationships and how the members of a family invented for urgent practical purposes become, by the end of the film, a loving, close-knit unit. Antonythasan Jesuthasan was himself a teenage Tamil Tiger, who came to France in his twenties (in the mid-1990s). He, Kalieaswari Srinivasan and Claudine Vinasithamby play their roles well although their characters are simpler than the principals in other recent Audiard films. Audiard may be making the point that the extreme circumstances in which Dheepan, Yalini and Illayaal continue to exist preclude the luxury of complexity but I wondered too if the director, with a knowledge of his lead actor’s biography that won’t be shared by much of the film’s audience, was relying on Jesuthasan’s presence to substantiate Dheepan’s personality. In any event, an exchange in which Yalini tells Dheepan he has no sense of humour ‘even in Tamil’ was welcome (because it was individualising and amusing). Audiard conveys definitely but not too obviously how the nine-year-old Illayaal, although she’s very upset when she starts school in Paris, adapts more easily than the adults to her new daily routines.
Jacques Audiard and his cinematographer, Eponine Momenceau, create some powerful images – especially the repeated appearance (in Dheepan’s mind) of the head of an elephant, black with flies. The editor is Audiard’s long-time collaborator, the expert Juliette Welfling. The oddest part of Dheepan – for British viewers anyway – is its ending. From the start, Yalini wanted a life in London, where she has relatives, rather than Paris; in the course of the story, as tensions between her and Dheepan increase, she repeatedly talks about, and at one point attempts, a second emigration. In the final scene of the film, we’re in a suburban London street – there’s a church on the corner, a red bus goes by. Audiard then shows Dheepan, Kalini and Illayaal as a smiling family group – along with a baby who is presumably Dheepan’s and Kalini’s child. The quartet are part of a cheerful, ethnically various gathering. Of course you’re relieved that the main characters have survived and are prospering; but the sudden happy ending, especially in view of the nearly relentless grimness of what’s gone before, is too good to be true. Ditto the bald suggestion that England is a land of multicultural milk and honey.
17 October 2015
