Isolated we stand

“When you look at me, don’t make that face,” Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) tells his fake wife, as she calls him by his fake name and snarls back, before she returns to a pot on the stove. The nine-year-old kid, Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), studying in the next room, is reciting a poem on friendship in French: “If you don’t have friends, you’re stupid, if you don’t have friends you are lonely, if you don’t have friends, what are you?”

While this may look like the drudgery of family life in poverty at first, there’s an upside: they now have some furniture. Dheepan , a French-Tamil film by Jacques Audiard, follows three Sri Lankan refugees who escape to France in search of a second chance, but are disappointed with where they find themselves. The three characters — Dheepan, Yalini and Illayaal — meet at a military camp, and assume the identities of a family of three that perished in the civil war. The film is a chilling reminder of everything that can go wrong in the life of a refugee, at a time when a significant chunk of the world is in the same boat. However, upon landing in France, the newly-formed family is thrown out of whack by language issues, and barring the first meeting with the immigration officer who allots them accommodation and jobs, the three have to fend for themselves.

Lost in translation: There are moments of intimacy and small acts of kindness between the three characters as they come to terms with life as refugees.

Reaching Le Pre-Saint-Gervais, Dheepan becomes the caretaker of a decrepit estate, and Yalini is in charge of cleaning and cooking at an old man’s house on the same estate. As they negotiate the unfamiliar, there are many problems that their French-to-Tamil dictionary won’t solve. And then there’s the old life — war included — that haunts all three. To make matters worse, the new life is not devoid of threats. A gang of men operates a drug ring from the building where Yalini works. Her employer has a visitor — Brahim the nephew, a young drug baron who lurks about in the apartment, appreciating her cooking, but also scaring her with his surreptitious ways.

The three strangers pretend to be a family as well as they can. The nine-year-old understands that her new mother has no love for her, but she plaintively tells her, “Even if you didn’t have a child, did you have a younger brother or sister? Be nice to me as you were to them. My mother is dead.”

Dheepan is as internal a commentary on its characters as an introspection on the war-torn world. Though the characters are from Sri Lanka, they could as easily be the Rohingyas of Myanmar, or Syrians. War refugees speak a common language. Towards the climax, when guns won’t stop blazing (spoiler alert!), Dheepan brings out his cart full of chalk powder, and demarcates a white line between the parking lot and the buildings as a ‘NO FIRE ZONE’. It is the first time in the film that Dheepan looks fierce, ready to kill for peace, ready to kill for his, and his adopted family’s right to safety.

They do not speak much of the island they have left behind. Their Tamil heritage is recalled in quiet moments of solitude, in Yalini praying in a temple, in Dheepan’s drunken moments, karaoking to Tamil songs of love, but even war songs. This bit in the film is open-ended. It is difficult to gauge what Dheepan feels at that moment —- is it the bitterness of a lost war, or the loss of identity?

In one of the most poignant conversations between Dheepan and Yalini, he asks her what it is that the French keep laughing at? He says, “I know all the words they are speaking, but I don’t think it is funny.”

Yalini replies, “That is because you don’t have a sense of humour.” Dheepan asks again, “French humour?”, to which she says, “No, you are not funny even in Tamil.”

Like the state of mind of its subjects, the film is also full of darkness. Only parts of the frame are illuminated,looking like feverish nightmares. These unlit frames recur — the chained dog that Yalini meets on her way up to the flat where she works, Le Pre-Saint-Gervais’s deserted streets, the repeated gunshots... everything points to threats that remind them of the state they left their country in. There are moments of intimacy between the three, ordinary acts of kindness in a bizarre situation. Illayaal brings a bunch of nargis (daffodils) to Dheepan, the only time they’re out with the Tamil community at a park. Dheepan, in turn, offers the flowers to Yalini, who smiles in appreciation. When Yalini drops Illayaal at school, the girl demands, “Kiss me on the cheek like the other mothers...”

The ending is nothing short of an Anurag Kashyap-climax. The imminent threat of violence becomes the new reality. Audiard’s films are known for focussing on the marginalised, and their redemption through kindness, and like Rust and Bone , this stays with you till the end. Dheepan didn’t get a theatrical release in India, which is unfortunate, for it won the 2015 Palme d’Or at Cannes. It is now available on Netflix.

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