If you haven’t seen Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet (2010), do whatever it takes to catch up. Also, don’t miss Auduard’s latest, Dheepan, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Dheepan is the story of a “fake family” of refuges from war-torn Sri Lanka. Former Tamil Tiger Dheepan (Antonysaythan Jesuthasan, himself a former boy soldier), in order to escape the battle zone, assembles a pretend family while in the refugee camp. A woman, Yalini (Kalieaswara Srinivisan), searches the camp for orphaned children. She eventually finds nine-year-old Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), a perfect fit for the dead family whose identity and passports the threesome will now assume.
The strangers manage to make it onto a boat to France. Dheepan, as swiftly as he swapped his warrior fatigues for civilian clothes in the camp, takes on the job of caretaker at a dive housing project on the outskirts of Paris, despite speaking virtually no French. Yalini cooks and cleans for Habib, a man with dementia, and Illayaal starts special needs classes. The film is by no means a smooth ride toward the crystallization of a pretend family into a real one. Audiard advances every tension and obstacle with craftsmanship loaded with plausible realism. Not least among the problems to be faced is the presence of a violent drug-dealing gang in the opposite housing block that contains Habib’s apartment.
Dheepan had better watch himself. His occasional bursts of anger suggest PTSD might be working in his psyche. Like the brilliant prisoner Malik in A Prophet, the quiet Dheepsn is a compelling figure. The sacrifices made by strikingly resilient displaced immigrants, couldn’t be better illustrated than it is here. Illayaal, who otherwise adopts to the new situation better than the two adults, sadly yearns for the unconditional
love that her two parental figures are unable to provide.
The film contains some harrowingly real crises, yet as memorable as they are they pale in comparison to the eloquent mark the three members of the family individually and collectively leave on the viewer’s consciousness. Audiard’s avoids sentimentality like he does easy answers. What we’re sure of is the sheer madness of being thrust into an alien environment with the added difficulty of having to playact a faux-familial situation.