PTSD, Identity, and the Immigrant Experience
Shot with the emotional and cinematic intensity of a crime thriller and interspersed with idyllic shots of mangrove trees and an elephant’s profound gaze, Jacques Audiard supplies all the excitement of a western action flick without shying away from a poetic perspective of diaspora life in his latest film Dheepan.
When I first saw this movie, I didn’t know what to expect; I went into the experience totally blind, only vaguely registering that it was foreign and told the story of a South Asian family. I wanted to judge the movie on completely objective terms, with no preconceptions about what it represented or entailed, armed only with the knowledge that it won the Palme d’Or in 2015. After having viewed and analyzed the film critically, I can attest that it was well-deserving of this accolade; offering far more than its brilliant performances and striking cinematography, Dheepan provides a perspective of the immigrant experience in Europe in a manner very few films have ever managed — with grace, style, and heart.
The three Sri Lankan protagonists, taking refuge in France to escape the Civil War and its repercussions in their homeland, have numerous struggles to overcome over the course of the film, namely assimilating to their new nation, as well as warming up to one another.
As if immigrating to the West wasn’t hard enough, our heroes must also keep up the guise of being a loving and normal family, despite the fact that they are utter strangers.
This plot device is a clever one. As the characters learn more about one another, the audience learn more about them, too. The interactions between this faux family unit are portrayed as interactions between individuals, whose actions and reactions are affected by the circumstances of their immigrant status, personal histories, and national background. (All things influenced by the world’s shared past of imperialism.) They are not relegated to meaningless stereotypes nor are their experiences and hardships romanticized for a privileged and patronizing viewer. This method of characterization is subtle yet effective by adding a layer of complexity crucial to the representation of minority groups in our media. Audiard offers to the largely Eurocentric audience of the Cannes Film Festival a diasporic narrative in which the characters are people before they are anything else, people who are just trying to get by with what the world has given them.
Given the context of the current refugee crisis, the addition of the theme of crime in the film was a risky one. Eponymous character Dheepan shows concerning signs of mental instability from the very beginning. His history as a Tamil child soldier is to blame for what is heavily implied to be post-traumatic stress disorder; so his volatile personality and violent predilections are not surprising. These traits may have harmful implications when proscribed to a male South Asian character, but Audiard is able to render Dheepan in such a way that we empathize with his pain and rage and do not regard him as a threatening presence onscreen. Instead, his rampage against French gangsters is portrayed as heroic and his mental breakdowns as heartbreaking. Here, we have a man whose mental illness does not define him or his people, a privilege of characterization people of color are rarely granted onscreen.
In a similar vein, showcasing South Asian refugees’ struggles with identity with such compassion is unheard of in Western narratives. Nine-year-old Illyaal is uncertain about learning French, her “mother” Yalini has difficulty traversing European and Sri Lankan ideals of a woman’s responsibilities, and Dheepan himself must accept that the family he once cherished is dead and gone and he must now assume responsibility as husband and father of two people completely alien to him. Upon arriving in France, he has no money, no job, and nowhere to stay. He is a nobody on the street — his name is not even his own.
Nevertheless, the Dheepan family prevails. They move past their differences, fend off adversity, and take care of one another the whole way through. They are not perfect, but they are people. People capable of kindness and cruelty, grappling with the conflicts around them as well as with internal battles of their own, and protecting one another by any means necessary. Perhaps their acting as a family is not so deceptive after all, then, for they truly are one by the end of the film. Just as they are true European citizens as well.
With this film, Audiard seems to be saying what members of any diaspora already know: no matter where or what you are from, you get to decide what you become.
