Embodying the Tamil diaspora: Audiard, Shobasakthi and the transnational languages of Dheepan

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ways in which the dual visions of French director Jacques Audiard and Sri Lankan Tamil writer Shobasakhti, despite a blatant lack of linguistic communication, come to cohabit the spaces and places depicted in Dheepan (2015), a film narrative about immigrant experience. As Audiard delegated decisions about on–set interactions and dialogue to his lead actor and the other Tamil cast members, he relegated his own role to a shaping of the sensorial dimensions of a human story– something the film does in strikingly cinematographic terms. In so doing, the pair constructed the contradictory backbone of a text that in many ways evades coherent political comprehension– at once an earnest attempt at depicting a ‘universal’ experience of marginalization (Audiard) and a scathing exposé of the West’s blind spots with regard to the Tamil situation in Sri Lanka (Shobashakthi). Combining one artist’s well–meaning contrivance and another’s quest for recognition, the film begins to emerge as something else entirely – an ideologically confusing, yet viscerally compelling, reflection on violence, its traumas, and its representational limits, filtered through the experience of a former Tamil Tiger. As concrete details about the Sri Lankan conflict and its human costs coagulate in the film’s affective pretensions, we re–conceive their purpose as not just remnants of a failed vanity project, but also an example of the transitive dynamics and inequitable flows of transnational screen culture, and of a globally minded art cinema at its most ideologically imperfect.

KEYWORDS:

• Audiard
• Shobasakthi
• French cinema
• Sri Lankan war
• transnational cinema

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. At a Cannes Festival televised interview, Audiard once more spoke of the Tamil diaspora as a ‘mystery’. See ‘Interview de Jacques Audiard, Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Kalieaswari, Kalieaswari Srinivasan Claudine Vinasithamby, Vincent Rottiers, Marc Zinga pour le film Dheepan’, Festival de Cannes, 21 May 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i87390kUi7I/. Accessed 29 June 2020.

2. These include King (2017), Pettersen (2019), Koksal and Çelik Rappas (2019), Massonnat (2018).

3. As quoted in Romney (2016).

4. Details from author’s interview with Jesuthasen. 18 November 2017. Paris, France.

5. As quoted in Romney (2016).

6. Shobasakthi. Traitor. Anushiya Ramaswamy, tr. Penguin, 2010. p. 181.

7. See for example Human Rights Watch 18.1 (C) (2006), Falksohn and Rao (2008).

8. The 31 March 2011 Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka estimated 40,000 were killed in the Mullivaikkal massacre with another 330,000 displaced refugees.

9. See here for the original song: https://tamileelamsongs.com/ethirikalin-pasarayai-thedi-pogirom/ Accessed 29 June 2020. Translations in article are our own and differ from those given in film subtitles.

10. Interview with Jesuthasen. 18 November 2017. Paris, France.

11. Interview with Jesuthasen. 18 November 2017. Paris, France.

12. Indeed Audiard himself admits in an interview that ‘I didn’t want to make a documentary on the civil war in Sri Lanka, or a documentary on a community, but to view these events and situations as a form of wallpaper that is part of the set without you actually having to describe it.” See Fabien Lemercier interview with Audiard, “Now he’s fighting for ones he loves’, Cineuropa, 21 May 2015. http://cineuropa.org/ff.aspx?t=ffocusinterview&l=en&tid=2842&did=293140. Accessed 29 June 2020.

13. These include Priyamvatha’s I Witnessed Genocide: Inside Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields (Channel 4, 2011), Frances Harrison’s Sri Lanka’s Unfinished War (BBC, 2013), Maga.Tamizh Prabhagaran’s This Land Belongs to the Army (2014) and Steve Loveridge’s Matangi/Maya/M.I.A (2018).

14. Interview with the author, 18 November 2017. Paris, France.

15. For more on the sense of ‘impurity’ we reference here, see Galt and Schoonover (2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Subha Xavier

Subha Xavier is Associate Professor of French at Emory University. She is author of The Migrant Text: Making and Marketing a Global French Literature (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2016) and has published articles and essays on the literature and cinema of migration. She is currently completing a second book entitled Transcultural Fantasies: China, France and the History of Sino-French Literary Exchange.

Charlie Michael

Charlie Michael is Assistant Professor of Film at Georgia Gwinnett College. He is the author of French Blockbusters: Cultural Politics of a Transnational Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2019) and the co-editor of the Directory of World Cinema: France (Intellect, 2013). His work has also appeared in journals such as SubStance, Quebec Studies and The Velvet Light Trap. He is currently working on a co-edited collection of essays on forgotten and overlooked French directors called The Other French New Wave and a monograph on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (under contract with Routledge).