James R | On 08, Aug 2016

Director: Jacques Audiard
Cast: Antonythasan Jesuthasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby
Certificate: 15
Watch Dheepan online in the UK: MUBI UK / BFI Player / Apple TV (iTunes) / Prime Video (Buy/Rent) / TalkTalk TV / Rakuten TV / Google Play

Immigration has never been a more discussed issue, but it’s something that has always been an essential part of civilisation: the need for the Earth’s booming population to move elsewhere, whether by necessity or desire, and make a new life. Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan explores the issue, but never in the way that you expect.

The film follows a family who relocate from Sri Lanka to Paris, where they must learn to fit in with the unwelcome locals. They’re not the most natural family unit: one’s a Tamil Tiger (Dheepan – Antonythasan Jesuthasan) and the other can’t speak a word of French (Yalini – Kalieaswari Srinivasan). Shacking up in a shed on a housing estate with a daughter (Claudine Vinasithamby), they’re surrounded, respectively, by gangsters in the neighbouring block and bullies at school – hardly the escape they hoped for when fleeing the Sri Lankan Civil War.

The ensuing tangle of human relationships carries all the unpredictable mess of real life, from the challenge of sorting mail in another language (Dheepan is a caretaker for the estate) to his haunted memories of being a soldier. There’s even time for unplanned bonding between Yalini and a local hoodlum.

Audiard has a knack for empathising with outsiders. Here, his film is full of them. “We’re not from here,” the French gang member tells Yalini of their callous attitude towards drug-dealing in that neighbourhood, “that stops us giving a shit.” She replies in her own tongue; a meaningful conversation in which neither can grasp the full meaning of what they’re saying.

As the family struggle to connect with each other, things boldly wander from romance to violence and back again. War. Migration. Crime. Marriage. Like their makeshift household, we’re never allowed to settle in one genre for long. Between Jesuthasan’s shell-shocked, intimidating male to Srinivasan’s heartbreakingly loyal wife – a scene-stealing character study in nods, smiles and shrugs – the experience of watching Dheepan means that while the local vandals may not care, we certainly do.

 
Dheepan is available to watch online on Amazon Prime Video as part of a Prime membership or a £5.99 monthly subscription.

 

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