Little Jaffna review – undercover cop thriller goes deep into French-Tamil gangland
|
Version 0 of 1. Lawrence Valin directs and stars in this Paris-set drama, where a young man caught between cultures infiltrates criminals shaped by Sri Lanka’s civil war Here is a Paris-set story that unfolds during the Sri Lankan civil war and revolves around Tamil immigrants supportive of the insurgent Tamil Tigers, but politics is not much more to the fore than good old-fashioned gangster machinations. Writer, director and star Lawrence Valin is himself from the French-Tamil community and he immerses the film within that hybrid culture beautifully, drawing out the internal conflicts and loyalties that a man like the one he plays here, Michael, might feel in the circumstances. Like many of the people he lives among, Michael is an orphan who came to France after both his parents met violent ends in the war in Sri Lanka. Brought up by his grandmother (Radhika Sarathkumar), who is, like much of the community, a staunch Catholic, Michael is torn between a longing for acceptance in the immigrant subculture and the local white French people among whom he’s grown up. Indeed, everyone calls him “whitey”, partly because he acts like a Frenchman, what with his insistence on eating with a fork instead of hands, and partly because of the vitiligo that creates white patches on his skin. But the secret that sets Michael apart is that he’s an undercover police officer on a mission to infiltrate a Tamil street gang run by godfather Aya (Vela Ramamoorthy) and his head honcho Puvi (Puviraj Raveendran), both actors and characters with tremendous presence like Valin himself. As Michael rises up the gang’s ranks, he learns more about their day-to-day operations, which involve basic extortion rackets, creaming funds from Parisian businesses in the neighbourhood known as Little Jaffna, as well as human trafficking and smuggling cash home to support the Tigers. Valin has the characters constantly keeping half an eye on the news to show how the war shapes these people’s lives on a quotidian level, but the script assumes viewers will have a certain level of knowledge about the Tamil Eelam conflict. Still, the film works best on the more local and micro level, celebrating the camaraderie of the gang, the constant stream of bilingual backchat and ribbing, and all the swagger that makes movie gangsters so dangerously seductive. Little Jaffna is on digital platforms from 15 September. |