Jesuthasan Antonythasan and Claudine Vinasithamby (Paul Arnaud/Sundance Selects)

In director Jacques Audiard’s immigrant drama Dheepan, three Sri Lankan refugees flee their volatile homeland for the more stable environs of suburban Paris. While stability is elusive, lessons learned on battlefield may well be applicable in their adopted home.

The film opens with a Tamil solider (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) looking on at the carnage after his entire unit is killed in the midst of civil war. To gain the papers necessary for escape, he takes the name and passport of Dheepan, a dead soldier, and joins a single woman and an orphaned girl to pose as a family.

We meet Dheepan on a vicious battlefield, but when he and his makeshift family leave the country, the tranquil image of lights flashing in the night turn out to be LED bunny ears that Dheepan is reduced to selling on Paris streets.

The movie unfolds as a study of the refugees’ struggle in a new land where they barely understand the language. Dheepan takes on a job as caretaker of a rough housing project in the suburb of Le Pre. His “wife” Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) cooks and cleans for an elder whose children reign over the project’s drug deals, while their “daughter” Illayal (Claudine Vinasithamby) is an immediate outcast when she enrolls in the local school.

The particulars of the struggle are typical of any immigrant family, but are all the more fraught with tension because of their invented relationship and the dark history they’ve fled. And naturally, the escalating local drug trade threatens to upend a tenuous détente.

The film is shot with a gritty intimacy that perfectly suits it subject, and the lead actors carry the film even as its neorealist aspects are overcome with melodrama. Jesuthasan’s quietly strong presence is all the more striking when you know his back story. Under the pen name Shobasakthi, he was an author before he was an actor; his 2001 novel Gorilla was a fictionalized memoir of his childhood as a soldier in the Tamil Tigers. When he takes a job as caretaker at a rough housing project, you see his painful lack of understanding as his boss tries to explain how to sort mail. This is a man who has clearly stood in defiance and alienation, and his fellow actors are nearly as believable, even if Audiard’s script doesn’t always give them believable actions.

Audiard observes the human struggle against strong odds, whether it is the organized crime of A Prophet or the physical handicap of Rust and Bone. Like the latter film, Dheepan suffers from an abrupt shift in tone. His latest drama finds resolution in a coda that turns maudlin thanks to an overblown music cue, but it’s a minor flaw in an otherwise strong film.

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Dheepan
Written and directed by Jacques Audiard
With Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby.
Rated R for violence, language and brief sexuality/nudity
Opens today at Landmark Bethesda Row