Introducing Dheepan

Shahim Sheikh

For the fourth part of ‘Screening Vulnerability’, we screened Jacques Audiard’s Palme d’Or winning 2015 film, ‘Dheepan’, under the category of ‘Immigration’. In the film, we follow a former Tamil Tiger, who in the final days of the Sri Lankan Civil War, escapes to France with a new identity and a fake family put together solely for the purpose of easing his exit from one nation and his entry into another.

The immigration crisis of Europe has been a topic of interest for European cinema for a while now. For Audiard, one of the most versatile filmmakers of the modern era, this crisis of displacement is a point of departure for looking into the shortcomings of the Global North in accommodating refugees. Dheepan and his ‘family’ leave a ravaged nation, only to land up in a Parisian suburb teeming with gang violence in the form of territorial skirmishes, armed conflict and a perpetual anticipation for things to worsen – a slightly less dangerous version of the reality they hoped to leave behind yet one where a stray bullet is still always a threat. Antonythasan Jesuthasan, the lead actor, experienced much of Dheepan’s unspoken trauma during the Civil War. A former Tamil Tiger himself, he lost a large number of family members in the war, which was followed by a prolonged struggle to find a new home. The migrant, as continuously vulnerable in terms of body and identity, is the film’s interpretation of what Rushdie called ‘the archetypal figure of our age’.

Hierarchy of Vulnerabilities in Dheepan

Gifty Ruben Prabhas

            At the very beginning of the film, we see a pyre set to burn the bodies of people who lost their lives in the Sri Lankan Civil War . Following this, we see people who have lost their homes and are stranded in an area which barely provides them food and shelter. Next, we see the protagonists of the film who have the privilege of relocating to a country to continue living and be provided with the basic necessities for living. What we can see here are the various degrees of vulnerabilities, the most vulnerable had been the people who died and whose stories we don’t even get to hear. Even the three protagonists, whose story forms the film, are vulnerable on different levels.

            Dheepan has enough pull with the officials to get a fake passport for himself and calmly waits inside a room while the replicable Yalini searches for a girl who could help them pretend as a family. The girl Illayaal who had lost her parents is given up by her aunt without as much as a dialogue, which makes her the most vulnerable of the three. All three of them are vulnerable in a country whose language they do not know well. But as the film progresses , we see Illayaal get less vulnerable as she acquires French through her schooling. This is an argument against the rhetoric of vulnerability which tends to homogenize people who are vulnerable in different ways just as they are different people.

Silence and narrative vulnerabilities in Dheepan

Sourav Jatua

Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan (2015) examines the individual relations between three immigrants who wish to escape a ravaged and civil war-torn Sri Lanka. The primary characters in the film – Dheepan, an ex-LTTE soldier, Yalini, a 26-year-old woman, and Illayal, a 9-year-old girl – come together under the pretence of being a family, to ease their immigration processes. The figure of the immigrant, once displaced, suffers a loss of narrative that makes their identity vulnerable to a host of economic and social adversities. In the face of these adversities, silence becomes the language of the immigrants. It dominates all their conversations – interpersonal, social, (their collective dialogues against an alien, unwelcome country), as well as with their own selves, seen when the characters individually cope with their own vulnerable situations. The characters develop a symbiotic relation with silence – it bridges their past identities and sense of belonging with the vulnerable present they find themselves in. The want to re-establish their old narrative identity and transcend their present vulnerability also emerge from this silence. There is a scene in the film where upon arriving at their new ‘home,’ Yalini asks if the water is drinkable. Upon being assured, she immediately sets up a makeshift altar for Lord Ganesh. This act is not a mere religious practise, it is the evidence of her want to re-establish life as she probably knew it to be. The film thus juxtaposes the life of an immigrant situated in the  vulnerable space between silence and of reacquiring a narrative.  

Immigrant populations confined to vulnerable spaces: Dheepan

Bhadhra R Nath

Audiard’s Dheepan (2015) focuses on the vulnerable spaces occupied by immigrant populations. The eponymous anti-hero of the film and his makeshift family of three have fled the Sri Lankan Civil War and sought refuge in France, where they remain vulnerable because their country of asylum is obliged to offer them only the bare minimum standards of living. Like most immigrants in France, Dheepan and his family find temporary dwelling in a Parisian banlieue. The semblance of safety that accompanies their asylum comes to an end when they are caught in the crossfire of rival gangs in the neighbourhood, who strike Dheepan as slightly “less dangerous” than the ones they encountered in Sri Lanka, telling us that they have effectively migrated from one unsafe space to another.

The precarity of their space persists despite their attempts to make it safe. In one scene, Dheepan attempts to cordon off the area surrounding his home, to protect his family from the ongoing gang war, calling it a “No Fire Zone.” This recalls the Sri Lankan Government’s “no fire zones,” which were designated safe areas for Tamil civilians. Not unlike the zones of his ‘home’ country that fell apart due to government violation, Dheepan’s new safe area is also violated by the gangsters. . In other words, the violation remains the same in both Sri Lanka and France, only the players change.

Thus, Audiard attempts to show us how an immigrant’s vulnerability cannot be mitigated until their country of asylum moves to provide them with spaces requisite for their safety and advancement. This is particularly pertinent in a world where 2% of the population are immigrants and this film enables a closer understanding of their lives and spaces.