Dheepan (the first leading role for Jesuthasan Antonythasan) is a Tamil fighter. He flees war-torn Sri Lanka with Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), posing as his wife and daughter , hoping that they will make it easier for him to get asylum in Europe . The makeshift family arrives in France and Dheepan finds work as a caretaker for an apartment building that is also a drug front . As Dheepan finds work as the caretaker of a run-down housing block in the suburbs ruled by a nasty gangster (Vincent Rottiers) . But the daily violence he faces off quickly reopens his war wounds , and Dheepan is forced to reconnect with his warrior's instincts to protect his new family .
Jacques Audiard's follow-up to Rust and Bone took home the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival . This thoughtful film has emotion , intense drama , thrills , political events and violence . Dheepan thrives on silence and it results to be a French film shot nearly entirely in Tamil language . A nearly wordless opening showing the eponymous character's tragic departure , the desperate meeting of Dheepan, Yalini, and Illayaal, and the voyage west is particularly effective . Audiard jumps smoothly through time and forces the audience to catch up with only the barest context, producing a marvelously suspenseful prologue . Good performance from Jesuthasan Antonythasan as Dheepan , a Sri Lankan Tamil warrior who flees to France and ends up working as a caretaker outside Paris . Jesuthasan was a boy soldier with the Tamil Tigers before fleeing Sri Lanka for France, just like the character he plays in the movie ; he is a writer, novelist and political activist in real-life . Excellent female lead actors Kalieaswari Srinivasan and Claudine Vinasithamby , both of whom never acted in a feature film before . Special mention for Vincent Rottiers as a tough mobster . Being first feature film of cinematographer Éponine Momenceau who creates an evocative as well as atmospheric cinematography and composer Nicolas Jaar who composes an adequate score . Being shot on location in Mandapam, Tamil Nadu, Rameshwaram, Tamil Nadu, Ooty, Tamil Nadu, India and La Coudraie, Poissy, Yvelines, France .
The motion picture was well directed by Jacques Audiard who gets phenomenal interpretations from the three leads , who are all essentially non-actors . Audiard is a good French writer and filmmaker . In the eighties he wrote the screenplays of some successful movies like "Mortelle Randonnee" (1983), "Reveillon Chez Bob" (1984), "Saxo" (1987), "Frequence Meurtre" (1988) and "Grosse Fatigue" (1994). Most of those films were thrillers directed by prestigious filmmakers like Claude Miller and Michel Blanc . He also directed some well received short movies . Thanks to the success of those movies he was able, in 1994, to raise up the money to make his first movie "Regarde Les Hommes Tomber" starred by Mathieu Kassovitz . Kassovitz also became the star of his second movie "Un Heros Tres Discret" released in the Festival de Cannes in 1996 where it won the award for best screenplay. In 2001 he made his third movie "Sur Mes Levres" about a love story between two outsiders . His last movie, "De Battre Mon Coeur Sest Arrête" was released in the Berlin festival of 2005 . His greatest success was ¨A prophet¨ . With those movies, Audiard has become the new master of the "polar" or French thriller and inheritor of others great French directors like Jean-Pierre Melville and Henri Georges-Clouzot .
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