Daniel Nelson

'Dheepan' is like two films bolted together.

Dheepan

Dheepan

Image by Dheepan

The first is a subtle, fascinating story about three Sri Lankans who pretend to be a family in order to increase their chances of resettlement in France. The second hits the screen like a lightning flash and is a short lone-avenger-kills-everyone-in-sight-as-he-blasts-a-path-to-rescue-the-girl adventure.

Dheepan becomes an avenging angel, as the former Tamil Tiger soldier shows a hapless bunch of young French drug-dealers what serious violence is about. Fact and fiction are entwined because the actor who plays Dheepan, Antonythasan Jesuthasan, is a former child soldier with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. He fled Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, got to France, and became a writer and actor. Dheepan is his first leading role.

After the film’s burst of explosions and lethal gunshots the film switches immediately back to an idyllic, peaceful suburban London garden and a happy ending another point for the English in their traditional battle with the French.

Apart from the extraordinary shift of tone, this is a film to savour. It opens with the wipe-out of platoon led by Sivadhasan (who subsequently adopts the name Dheepan) during the civil war and a fast-moving scene in which a young woman, Yalini,  scours  a refugee camp to find an unattached child, Illayaal, to form a fake family that will fit a dead man’s passport.

The “family” goes through the migrant mill – struggling with a new language, adapting to strange cultural ways, finding a house, getting a job, feeling you are being stared at, shunned by other kids at school. They also have to pick their way carefully around each other. They need one another but aren’t together by choice.  Illayaal asks Yalini, who isn’t interested in her or children generally, to kiss her goodbye at the school gate, like the real mothers do.  When Yalini says she has no experience with children, Illayaal points out that Yalini had brothers and asks why she can’t at least be kind. There’s a nicely observed moment when Dheepan expresses puzzlement about the way foreigners inexplicably say things and then laugh: Yalini bursts into laughter, because, she explains, Dheepan himself never laughs.

Amidst the emotional dancing, everyday life is gradually established: the practical Dheepan has a job as a janitor, and Yalini finds work looking after an old man on the estate, Illayaal quickly picks up French.

Alongside this “family” saga, however, is a lurking menace. The block Dheepan looks after and where Yalini works, which runs parallel to their own block and which they can see through their window, comes to life at night, with figures busily coming and going. Its threatening presence builds up through the film, almost like a sci-fi or horror movie. Dheepan isn’t allowed into to clean up until the gangs have left. Yalini discovers the flat in which she cooks and cleans is at the centre of a drug gang.

It is this situation that finally erupts into violence.

·         Dheepan is showing at the London Film Festival on 16 October at the Picturehouse Central, and  17 October at the Odeon Leicester Square

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