Three Sri Lankan refugees passing as a family try to restart their lives outside of Paris
Whether by chance or the filmmaker’s design, the touchingly modest wardrobe of a young schoolgirl in “Dheepan” includes a T-shirt that says “New World Order.”
Her life bespeaks a new world disorder. She’s a refugee from Sri Lanka who has managed to reach France as part of a pretend family-a mother, father and daughter who barely know one another, though that’s not what it says on their false documents, and who don’t know how to begin making a new life for themselves in an alien culture.
Every day we see new accounts of refugee tides coursing across continents, and every account challenges our comprehension.
Jacques Audiard’s superb drama, which won the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, rises to the challenge with the power of art and not a scintilla of sentimentality.
The film, in French and Tamil with English subtitles, takes its title from the hero, who, in his turn, has taken the name on his purloined passport. Dheepan was a Tamil fighter who lost his family in Sri Lanka’s civil war.
(He’s played by Antonythasan Jesuthasan, a writer and former militant whose life roughly resembles that of his character.)
We know little more about this commandingly intense man at the outset, and next to nothing about Yalini, his supposed wife, or Illayaal, a lost child in the refugee camp where the three first met. (In a polished production of flawless performances, they’re played, respectively, by Kalieaswari Srinivasan and Claudine Vinasithamby.)
As a narrative of immigrant life, “Dheepan” moves swiftly, with intriguing twists and turns.
France doesn’t treat the arriving trio particularly well or badly.
They’re simply left to their own devices after being resettled outside Paris in a grimy housing project.
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