Dheepan review

Jacques Audiard has made his name, in films such as A Prophet, Rust & Boneand The Beat That My Heart Skipped, for a kind of ecstatic violence of the soul. Dheepan, his new film about a former Tamil Tiger fighter looking for a new life in France, certainly has some of the director’s trademark ferocity, especially in its final minutes, but it displays what I can only describe as dialled-down Audiard. Indeed, much of the time it even ambles, peacefully, with nothing much happening.

It begins with a short sequence in Sri Lanka: the civil war is over, the Liberation Tigers are burning their dead comrades’ bodies and swapping fatigues for civilian clothes to try and melt into the general population. In a refugee camp, a young woman is looking for unaccompanied children: not for anything as gruesome as sex-trafficking or slavery, we discover, but to be part of a hastily thrown together fake family, to help one such fighter get clear of the battle zone and into Europe. The three of them, essentially strangers to each other, eventually find themselves in France, and we watch them attempting to adapt to the precarious new reality: negotiating their way through an immigration hearing, peddling tat on the pavements, scattering at the inevitable shout of “les flics!”

The man, going by the name Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan), eventually gets a job as a caretaker, and the trio make their way to a rundown housing estate; a recently abandoned flat is opened up and given to them to make their home. New codes must again be learned, and new negotiations made – particularly with the twitchy-looking gang who control the local drugs trade, and who take over one of the nearby blocks each morning. Dheepan’s role as a caretaker gives him a pass, though, and he and his compatriots settle cautiously into their new life, admittedly at the roughest end of France’s social scale. The kid, Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), starts school, and Dheepan’s “wife” Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) gets a job too, cooking and cleaning for a man called Habib, evidently suffering from dementia. (Even here, though, the paranormality is in evidence: the senior figures in the downstairs drug gang have taken over Habib’s sitting room as a sort of office-cum-R&R space.) Through the mundane business of living, the three edge towards intimacy, even approximating in actuality the family they are pretending to be.