Three war-torn strangers posing as a family flee Sri Lanka’s civil war to start over in a troubled Paris suburb, but their past traumas resurface as they struggle to survive in their new environment.
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CinemaSerf
7
By CinemaSerf
More like out of the "Dheepan" and into the fire! He (Jesuthasan Anthonythasan) is a Tamil separatist on Sri Lanka who is having to come to terms with the fact that their cause is lost. Fearing persecution, he decides to head to France where he can claim asylum. Along the way, he encounters "Yalini" (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and her daughter "Illayaal" (Claudine Visasithamby) and concluding that all would do better if they claimed to be a family, try to seek safety. Oddly enough, their lack of French language skills and papers doesn't seem to inhibit their arrival in France, but the reward for their efforts is his care-taking work in a block of flats in a lawless Parisian suburb where there seems little evidence of police to patrol the streets run by heavily armed gangs of youths. His job as the janitor seems to give him and his family a degree of immunity from what can only be describes as cross-border violence, and his experiences at home ensure he is no shrinking violet, but watching the hostilities increase and become more and more violent, you just know that their precarious situation must be heading for a crescendo. The efforts from both leading actors here is commendable. Their character's struggles to survive, to get the girl to safety and their own aspirations for a decent life are very well presented by convincing performances. It also gives us a rather grisly look at life in some of the French communities that have long since been abandoned by the state. The subtitles sparingly interpret auteur Jacques Audiard's shared screenplay but what they miss in translation is evident as we watch the scenario of brutality, blood and bullets unfold in front of us. Might they have been safer staying at home? Scary stuff, this - and very realistic.
