In the opening scenes, a woman (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) desperately searches through a Tamil refugee camp in Sri Lanka, looking for an orphaned girl — any orphaned girl. Locating one such child (Claudine Vinasithamby), she whisks her away to a small office, where the two of them join a man (
That sense of imbalance, the idea of the ground constantly shifting under these characters — and, by extension, the audience — plays to director Audiard’s strengths, to the emotional intimacy of his camera and the urgency with which he relays immediate experience. Constantly in danger of being found out, this makeshift family has to keep everything close. Even the smallest interaction becomes a challenge of sorts. And though they may have left their battle-scarred land, chaos still surrounds them.
When they move into a gang-riddled housing project, where Dheepan/
The man now known as Dheepan was an officer in the insurgent separatist group the Tamil Tigers during the Sri Lankan Civil
Audiard doesn’t show us much of what these characters went through in their former lives — the temptation for harrowing flashbacks must have been huge — but we still see the effects. Dheepan briefly visits with his former commander, who’s lost his mind and thinks he’s still giving orders. When a teacher asks
So the past is never far. And as the situation at the housing project gets
With that immediacy also comes a kind of unreality, however — a dreamy disconnect. In the film’s violent, even explosive climax, the camera fixes on the characters so thoroughly that while we can see everything that happens on their faces, we can’t always see what’s actually happening around them. That idea of being thoroughly in touch with the senses while being separated from the self, however, turns out to be an apt stylistic correlative. Ultimately, Dheepan is the story of three people struggling to maintain their humanity, even as they lose their identities.