The distinguished French filmmaker Jacques Audiard won the most important award in his career for this exceptional combination of thriller and drama. The director of great films such as “Un prophete”, “Rust and Bone” and “The Beat that My Heart Skipped” was awarded the Palme d’Or in Cannes by a film about three people from Sri Lanka who managed to escape the horrors of the war there in order to France found themselves in an equally difficult situation. Just like in the previous films, Audiard’s focus is once again on people from the margins of society, characters who want to find their place under the sun and ensure a good and quality life, but it doesn’t usually go that way.
Audiard found inspiration for “Dheepan” partly in Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters”, partly in Peckinpah’s classic “Straw Dogs”, and he was given essential guidance by the lead actor Antonythasan Jesuthasan who embodied the title character, Dheepan. In real life, Jesuthasan joined guerrilla fighters from Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers, who had been at war with the majority Sinhalese for years as a teenager in the mid-eighties. After Sri Lanka freed itself from British colonial rule after World War II, the majority Sinhalese began to persecute the minority people, the Tamils. As a young man, Jesuthasan was a Tamil Tiger guerilla, and after he managed to escape to France in the early nineties, he worked all kinds of low-paid jobs before turning to writing.
His main topic, of course, was the civil war in his Sri Lanka, and that’s how he met Audiard, so it’s no surprise that Dheepan has a similar fate as the actor himself. Dheepan’s real name is actually Sivadhasan and after the collapse of the Tamil Tigers, he is forced to leave the country, but in order to gain asylum in France, he must come up with a convincing story. After he manages to get the dead person’s passport, he will find a woman and a little girl posing as his wife and daughter. And really soon they will end up in France and will be placed in an apartment block in the suburbs of Paris, one of those apartment blocks we met in Kassovitz’s cult “La haine”. These are slums where gangs rule, dangerous criminals, dealers, and the building where they are located is exactly in the zone of confrontation between two warring gangs.
After he starts working as a janitor, Dheepan will try to perform his tasks as best as he can, while his “wife” will get the job of taking care of the father of the head of one of the criminal organizations. Of course, it will turn out that the peaceful life they wanted and expected cannot be realized there, and this initially almost standard social drama about the issue of asylum seekers will turn into a fierce thriller. However, “Dheepan” is at the same time an impressive film about the experiences of asylum seekers, people who have often survived the unimaginable and will do anything to get a ticket to the west where people like them are often despised.
Audiard did a great job of building a relationship between Dheepan and Yalini, the woman who traveled with him to France and has to pretend to be his wife and the mother of a little girl they just picked up in Sri Lanka, even though she has other plans. While we don’t know exactly what happened to their real families back home, it’s clear that they’re all left alone, but Dheepan takes his role as the breadwinner and breadwinner seriously. Audiard managed to make an extremely high-quality, yet at the same time polemical and controversial film that does not waste energy and time on didactics.