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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.