The first half of Dheepan is promising enough. The film’s title is the name of one of its main characters—it’s not Sivadhasan’s (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) real name, but the one he adopts in order escape from Sri Lanka and his past with the Tamil Tigers. A woman who takes the name Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and a young girl who goes by Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) in tow, Dheepan escapes to France, and all three of them pose as a family unit, living together in a rather dangerous housing block just outside Paris. Naturally, their lack of fluency in French throws obstacles into their abilities to ease into their new lives.
More challenging than that language barrier, however, is trying to maintain the illusion of being a close-knit family without much in the way of authentic familial warmth. The latter adds a fresh subtextual layer to the film’s near-sociological first half: Dheepan, at least in its early going, is as much about characters engaged in putting up a performative front as it is about refugees adjusting to life in an unfamiliar country. Through his closely observant eye, director/co-writer Jacques Audiard manages to generate some mild suspense as to whether they will somehow actualize into the family they’re pretending to be.
But then, midway through the film, Dheepan meets a former Tamil Tigers colonel (Vasanth Selvam) also hiding out in France. When he defies the colonel’s orders to secure more weapons for the group’s cause, saying his life as a revolutionary is over, the colonel viciously beats him up. It is at this point that not only does Dheepan take an unexpected psychological nosedive, but Audiard’s film takes a similarly disheartening, steep decline. Suddenly, with explosions of violence making life in that housing block even more perilous than before, Dheepan becomes less about sociology, family and performance than, much less interestingly, about machismo: one man’s desire to battle the gang that has taken over the block, behavior that is too simply chalked up to traumas he may have suffered as a fighter back in Sri Lanka.