Dheepan · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man stands between lanes of stopped traffic wearing plastic devil horns that flash red and green. He is selling them. The light comes off his face and off the windshields and lands on nothing. It's one of the loveliest shots in the film, and it's also a job description: the bottom rung of the informal economy, light sold by the unit. The man under the horns fought for the Tamil Tigers. In Paris he changes lightbulbs for a living.

Hold that image. The film spends the next hour asking what someone like that is permitted to do.

Not much. He sweeps the courtyard of a housing estate outside Paris and watches the dealers set up in the stairwells, and the arrangement he's watching is, in its logic, the arrangement he fled: armed young men, held territory, a boundary you cross at your own risk. He sees it clearly. He can do nothing about it, and for a long stretch the film refuses to let him try.

This is where Deleuze earns a place beside the film rather than on top of it. He split cinema into two regimes. In the movement-image (most films, most of the time) a character perceives a situation and acts on it, and the act changes the situation; the cutting exists to carry that current from seeing to doing. After the war he found films where the current had been cut. Characters began perceiving more than they could answer. He called them voyants, seers, and called their predicament pure optical and sound situations: you look, you listen, you can't intervene.

Dheepan is a seer by paperwork. Asylum has put him inside a machine of forms, interviews and interpreters that decides who counts as a person, and the machine has issued him a broom. Audiard then does something crueller with language. Tamil here is the language of intimacy and argument; French arrives as obstruction, bureaucracy, threat. Because Dheepan and Yalini understand almost nothing said around them, and because we have subtitles, our comprehension runs permanently ahead of theirs. We know what's in the room before they do. The dread isn't built from withheld information but from information that has already arrived and can't be received. The broken link between seeing and doing, staged as a translation problem.

The war never comes back as flashback. Not once. Deleuze distinguishes the recollection-image, the dated flashback, a former present you visit and return from, from what he calls sheets of past, where the past isn't a destination but a layer you're standing in. Audiard's version is acoustic. Nicolas Jaar's score, his first, is sub-bass drone and processed texture that never quite separates from the sound design, so fireworks and gunfire, traffic and shelling, stay productively confusable. Nobody remembers the war. It's simply audible, underneath, at the wrong moments. That's the film's most elegant invention: trauma carried in the low end of the mix instead of by a cut.

Then there's the forgery that starts everything. Three strangers walk out of the last weeks of the Sri Lankan war holding a dead family's passports, and to keep the papers they have to produce the family in the flesh — a husband, a wife, a daughter. Deleuze's term for this is the powers of the false, and his point is that the false isn't mainly a lie. It's a power that makes. His forger doesn't deceive so much as produce. What's moving about the middle of Dheepan is that the forgery starts working: cooking, school runs, a routine, a slowly earned tenderness between two adults assigned to each other by a document. Deleuze called that fabulation, legending — catching people in the act of storying themselves into existence. And behind it sits his blunt phrase for a politics with no constituency to address: the people are missing. Dispersed, defeated, or never permitted. A Tamil family assembled from dead people's documents is that condition compressed into a prop.

The casting belongs to a much older argument. Antonythasan Jesuthasan was a child soldier in the LTTE and writes under the name Shobasakthi; he isn't a screen professional in the ordinary sense. That's the Bicycle Thieves procedure Bazin defended: find a non-professional whose body already carries the history the script never states, then direct for gait, stillness and reaction rather than for technique. Deleuze's name for what that yields is a cinema of the body, where posture carries the time the plot won't. Watch the man's shoulders in the gatehouse. That's the performance.

And then there's the line. Drunk, Dheepan paints a white stripe across the courtyard and declares it a no-fire zone. In the war's final months, areas officially designated No Fire Zones were shelled with civilians inside them. He is redrawing, in paint, the boundary that failed to save anyone he knew. The dealers laugh at him. Deleuze's word for an object that condenses a film's entire organising relation is symbol, and there are few cleaner cases: a painted line is either sovereign or it's a joke, and which one it is happens to be the whole question.

Then the last twenty minutes throw all of this out, and the argument about the film has never moved past it.

Dheepan goes up the building with a gun. The camera pins itself to his back, the space opens only as far as the next landing, and we're given no master shot that would let us count the dead. That blocking is Taxi Driver's, precisely. The room-by-room conversion of a home into a defensible perimeter is Straw Dogs. The siege as a grammar of doorways and sightlines, attackers announced by sound before they're granted an image, is Assault on Precinct 13, which is also why the estate has been photographed all film as terrain — corners, elevations, angles of fire — rather than as sociology. The three-part shape (stranger with a buried violent past takes a labouring job, saves the community by force, is disqualified by the act that saved it) is Shane with the valley swapped for a courtyard. And the exposure is Death Wish: render a territory as uniformly criminal and the escalation reads as licensed, a social diagnosis answered with a handgun in the final reel.

Here's what makes it more than a lapse. Deleuze's history runs one way. The action-image was strong; then the world stopped being something a person could act on, and cinema learned to watch. Dheepan runs that history backwards inside a single film. A man stripped of every link between what he sees and what he may do gets the link back, and the only mechanism available for returning it to him is genre. He becomes an agent again by shooting people. The circuit is restored at full power, in the one register France had kept in reserve for him.

Whether Audiard is indicting that or enjoying it stays undecided, and I don't think the film resolves it. What it does refuse is the version that would have been comfortable. No crossing, no boat, no arrival montage; camp to Paris is executed as a cut. And there's the elephant, materialising out of black forest, unbidden, out of a fable cycle with no interest whatsoever in immigration law — another order of being, pressing on the frame from somewhere the passport machine can't locate. The final scene leaves France entirely, sunlit and calm, and may be a future or may be a wish. The film won't say.

Watch it again for what Dheepan is looking at when he isn't doing anything. That's most of the movie, and it's what the ending spends.