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French director Jacques Audiard's "Dheepan" won the Palme D'Or at Cannes last year, but feels as fresh as a news bulletin — a gripping tale of immigrants escaping violence in their home country but still struggling with violence in their soul.
The story begins with a lie: In a Tamil refugee camp in Sri Lanka, Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) looks for an orphan girl of a certain age. She finds Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), who's about 9 or 10. Yalini takes Illayaal to the processing center where Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) has arranged to meet her. He has arranged to buy the passports of a deceased family — father, mother and daughter — and the three strangers will pose as this family to get out of Sri Lanka.
This phony "family" lands in France, shuffling from apartment to apartment. Soon, Dheepan finds work as a caretaker for an apartment complex in the suburbs. The block is impoverished, the elevators often don't work, and entire portions are in the control of the local drug dealers.
While Dheepan cleans hallways, Illayaal tries to adjust to a new school and Yalini finds work tending to Mr. Habib (Faouzi Bensaïdi), a disabled man living in the block. Mr. Habib's living room, she learns, is a meeting place for one of the area's gangs — because one of Mr. Habib's relations, the recently paroled Brahim (Vincent Rottiers), is one of the gang leaders.
These three refugees try to fit in and start becoming the family they pretend to be, but the ghosts of the past linger. Dheepan is confronted with his past as a Tamil Tiger soldier when an exiled colonel (Vasanth Selvam) demands he help secure guns to send back to Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, Dheepan also reacts to the gang gunplay outside his window — violence of the sort he thought he escaped.
The performances are understated and devastating. Jesuthasan unearths the pain of a warrior who wants to lay down his weapons but finds he cannot. Even more compelling is Srinivasan, who reveals Yalini to be a resilient woman determined to preserve her new life.
Audiard ("A Prophet"), who co-wrote the script with Noé Debré and Thomas Bidegain, crystallizes the immigrant experience — the disorientation of a strange new place, the struggle to make a home and the difficulty reconciling one's old life to a new one. With gritty images and an economy of dialogue, the film tells a small story that stands for the thousands of refugees now trying to gain a footing in Europe.
Twitter: @moviecricket —
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'Dheepan'
Sri Lankan refugees battle past demons in a new home in France in this riveting drama.
Where • Broadway Centre Cinemas.
When • Opens Friday, June 10.
Rating • R for violence, language and brief sexuality/nudity.
Running time • 115 minutes; in Tamil and French, with subtitles.