In his seventh feature film, Dheepan, which won the coveted Golden Palm award at the 68th Cannes Film Festival recently, 63-year-old Jacques Audiard makes love, not war.
Despite the fact that the film begins in war-torn Sri Lanka only to make its way into what can be described as a French suburban guerrilla zone, Dheepan is a deeply moving love story. Audiard uses the noir genre—the film pans out like a thriller, with several scenes of extreme violence—to tell us a story propelled by two magnificent actors, Antonythasan Jesuthasan, a former Tamil Tiger turned writer and actor, and India’s Kalieaswari Srinivasan, who plays Dheepan’s pretend Sri Lankan wife here.
It’s a fake family that goes from Sri Lanka to France. Dheepan has lost his family to the war, as has Yalini. She is on the lookout for a man and an orphan (Illayal, played by Claudine Vinasithamby) who could pass off as her...
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