2 films de Jean-Pierre et Luc Dardenne : LA PROMESSE & ROSETTA

THE PROMISE (La promesse)(1996, Belgium/France, 90 min, color, aspect ratio: 16:9, sound: Dolby Digital 2.0, language: French, subtitles: English)EXTRAS: Trailer / Gallery / Director & cast filmographyThe Promise isn’t the first feature film to come from the famous Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (following Falsch and Je pense à vous, it’s actually their third), but it’s the one that put them in the spotlight world-wide. It won awards in the US and Spain as well as their home country, and catapulted 2 actors to stardom – Olivier Gourmet and making a sensational cinema début, Jérémie Renier. The films that followed (especially Rosetta, The Son and The Child) firmly established the Dardennes as directors ranking alongside the best in the world who I take to be Haneke, Almodóvar, Téchiné, Tarr, Kiarostami, Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien. With Kiarostami dead, Tarr in self-enforced retirement and Almodóvar and Wong now turning out lower quality films (I hope, I pray, they still have masterpieces inside them) the elite club is small indeed. With some people doubting the achievements of Two Days, One Night and The Unknown Girl it remains to be seen if the Dardennes can keep it up with their forthcoming Ahmed due for release this year. Make no mistake though, The Promise is a truly wonderful film, the morally unimpeachable morality tale-like central story as tight as a knot, perfectly acted and beautifully shot without an ounce of fat in any department. The lean treatment matches the material perfectly as we undergo a riveting 90 minute journey which is as intense as almost anything this side of Robert Bresson. It doesn’t quite match the French master I have to say, but then nobody does. What follows is a fairly close thematic reading of the film with spoilers. Watch before you read.In essence The Promise is about the loss of innocence as 14-year old Igor (Renier) is denied his childhood (represented by a go-cart), and a future profession (a car mechanic apprenticeship) by his rough gruff father Roger (Gourmet) who uses him to run an illegal business, transporting and sheltering illegal immigrants en-route from the darker parts of the world (Romania, the Balkans, Africa, North Korea, take your pick) to America. At the outset Igor has already been severely damaged morally. The first act we see is him stealing the purse of an old lady. Then we see him mired in the daily grind of his father’s grisly business, transporting immigrants, checking in passports and papers, running the shabby shelter where they all live in desperate circumstances. Igor observes his father fleecing them out of all the money he can get, buying confidence with false promises and shopping bodies to the police to buy protection. Remnants of Igor’s good nature cling on in brief scenes involving his young friends and a go-cart, and his compassion shown to a couple from Burkina Faso and their baby. The father quickly douses these however by working Igor so hard that he has no time for his go-cart and later in the film the boy gives up the ignition key to a friend he meets by chance, a tiny moment of extraordinarily huge emotional import for it’s the moment he gives up his childhood forever.With the Burkino Faso couple Amidou and Assita (Rasmané and Assita Ouédraogo) and their baby, Igor reaches a point where he finally says “no” to all the crimes his father is implicating him in. Amidou falls from a building and as he lies dying he asks Igor to take care of his family. Igor’s first reaction is to take him to the hospital, but horrified he watches his father bury the body beneath cement and then lie to Assita telling her that her husband has escaped because of gambling debts. Igor wrestles with his conscience. Which is more important, keeping his word to the dying man or carrying out his filial duty? This is the moral dilemma at the center of the whole film. Igor fluctuates from one to the other, but gradually the ‘innocence’ within the boy wins out. When he realizes his father is about to put the woman on a train to prostitution in Cologne he courageously defies his father by rescuing her and her child. After dark street episodes including a hospital visit, Assita finally agrees to follow the advice of an African seer to stay with relatives living in Italy, and eventually goes to the rail station with Igor to catch her train. Igor of course still hasn’t kept his word. He realizes that he’s not much better than his father who had wanted to put her on a train in the first place. Finally, he blurts out the truth, that her husband is dead. The film closes as the two characters walk off to uncertain futures – probable deportation for her as she goes to the police, and probable imprisonment for the father and lock-up in a juvenile home for Igor. But he kept his word and a ray of ‘innocence’ remains.There are many things to light on in this film. First and foremost perhaps is the extraordinary way the Dardennes observe the central father-son relationship. Both are fully-rounded believable characters who are anything but stereotypes. Igor is damaged goods to be sure. He steals and goes along with his father in everything, but at the same time he retains such boyish innocence, such uncalculating charm, such tenderness. He loves his father and his father loves him no question. The father is a crook engaged in despicable activities, but the Dardennes very carefully etch in scenes which show his warm humanity as well – especially making up with Igor after he gives Assita money behind his back. They roll on the bed together, the father gives Igor a copy of the same ring he has and then prints a tattoo on his arm. The father clearly believes in toughening his son up, so he lets him drive his truck and takes him to a karaoke night at a bar where clearly he arranges a woman for Igor to have if he desires. Later when the father prowls the streets searching for Igor, it’s the act half of a desperate man worried about being shopped to the police, but half a loving father worried about his son. Even when Igor succeeds in locking him up in the garage the father’s pleading is both morally bankrupt (preying on filial duty) and also the act of a man who commits crimes for his son and their house (their future together) as well as for himself. This sympathy that is retained for the father drives Igor crazy and the spectator along with it so that small moments like Igor selling his father’s ring for cash are incredibly moving. Bruno crying into the phone when he tells his father where the truck is parked and then crying again as he resists his father as the man pleads while being chained up are incredibly visceral moments which involve us completely in the fraught relationship between the two. We should write this father off as a monster parent, but we can’t just as Igor can’t and that dilemma is kept on a knife-edge throughout, partly through the impeccable script, but also of course through the amazing performances from Renier and Gourmet.Another thing that stands out is that, though the film seems to close the circle by going back to the origins of cinematic modernism, namely neorealism, and though the nearest touching stone for the film’s moral meditation on good and evil may be Robert Bresson, the Dardennes deploy the technique of the thriller which connects it very strongly with the mainstream and makes it instantly accessible in a way ‘art film’ usually isn’t. When I first saw it 2 years ago I was immediately caught up in it to the extent that I doubted whether repeated viewings would retain the same level of interest. Coming back to it I realize my feeling hasn’t changed and that the use of ‘thriller’ conventions is not only highly effective, but also wholly appropriate. Once Amidou dies and the rift has opened up between father and son the narrative moves relentlessly towards the moment when Igor tells the truth. The basic situation is ‘the hero on the run protecting an innocent from the baddy as they cross rough terrain,’ and cuts across many genres, looking backwards notably to Westerns (Anthony Mann’s Man of the West, Peckinpah’s The Deadly Companions, etc) and looking forwards to mainstream thrillers and even comedies (Martin Brest’s Midnight Run, Howard Becker’s Mercury Rising, Alfonso Cuerón’s Children of Men, etc). The Dardennes never knowingly quote films, but the type is basically the same. The hero with a secret is Igor, the innocents are Assita and her baby, the baddy is the father and of course the rough terrain is the decaying industrial city of Seraing, situated just outside Liège. The plot works just like a typical genre thriller – Igor drives Assita away with a screech of tires, they hole up in various dangerous locations as the father drives around on a motorbike searching for them, they are framed against the threat of the city including ugly buildings and busy roads, Assita gets harassed by racist bikers, the baby gets sick and there’s a frantic search for a hospital, a cleaner in the hospital acts as a thriller-like deus ex machina to help pay Assita’s bill before introducing a seer and then lending Assita papers for her travel, there’s the inevitable confrontation between father and son solved by Assita hitting the father over the head and finally there’s the stock railway station finish so beloved of thrillers where Igor at last speaks out. In laying out the film’s central father-son relationship the adoption of thriller tropes works very well, especially as the Dardennes take care to round their characters beyond the ‘types’ usually found in such films. Crucially, the central moral dilemma (keeping one’s word v filial loyalty, good v evil) is made crystal-clear and Igor’s final confession comes as a huge collective release as the film’s central dramatic tension is finally resolved. The effect is overwhelming and impressively achieved.Qualifying the film ever so slightly though is the lack of that central ingredient we recognize in all Bresson’s films – namely spiritual metaphysical weight. A Man Escaped is another film which moves relentlessly forward like an arrow towards a final moment of epiphany as a man escapes from a Nazi prison. There Bresson’s Jansenist predestination drives the narrative forward always with the feeling that something higher is looking down determining in advance how things are developing – like a puppet-master, God hovers over the prison holding the strings dictating exactly the progress of the hero and when he does achieve his emancipation a burst of Mozart heralds an extraordinary moment of spiritual/emotional epiphany unequalled I would say anywhere else in cinema. Sad to say there is no such spiritual or metaphysical import in The Promise. Magical and as impeccably moral as Igor’s final words are, the film remains fundamentally earthbound. In short, as moved as we are it doesn’t quite transport us. That is perhaps the price the Dardennes pay for adopting thriller tropes.Bresson may be the touchstone towards which the Dardennes like to think they reach, but they are much more successful in making a neorealist film for the 90s. Returning to the practices of the great Italian neorealists of the war and immediate postwar period (Visconti, De Sica, Rossellini, Fellini, etc) the Dardennes consciously return to the start of cinematic modernism with their deployment of unknown actors and amateurs, location shooting, use of available light, documentary style (the restless handheld camera), and the focus on disenfranchised people living on the edge of society, in this case criminals and illegal immigrants. As shot, Seraing is as threatening and hostile as the various urban environments in Rossellini’s War Trilogy or the Milan of Bicycle Thieves. Like Rossellini they constantly frame their characters in threatening situations and beside walls, fences and waste ground. These places are often associated with movement and transience, especially busy roads (characters often shot across roads with the busy traffic moving laterally across in the foreground of the shot) and the station in the last sequence, the sound of trains providing the ‘music’ playing as the final credits roll. One wholly typical neorealist-style sequence has Assita resting under a road bridge. We hear the sound of passing traffic and then see her being drenched by bikers from on high. Then they get on their bikes and ride around and down, destroying her possessions with their machines as she cowers in fright beside the road which also happens to be by a river, another place associate with transience. The complete absence of music (except for the karaoke sequence which is devastatingly effective precisely because it stands out) and the exclusion of cute kids ‘observing’ the evil behavior of adults are 2 elements which work against the neorealist norm (lack of music is also a Bresson feature), but the characters are all essentially functions of their environment, the depressing milieu reflecting the depressed states of the humans that inhabit it. And as with Rossellini, characters are forever hurtling around frantically, but advancing just fractionally. Indeed at the end here it’s hard to see who has advanced at all. Assita remains trapped and probably has to return to zero while the father-son link has been shattered, probably permanently.In total, this film is hugely impressive and I can’t recommend it strongly enough. The thriller elements may prevent the spiritual engagement that comes with Bresson, but as said they do help us focus precisely on the central issue and with characters as well drawn as they are, the film is never less than gripping. I would bracket this film with The Child for its similar visual style and also epiphany located within a character also played by Jérémie Renier. The 2 films in between (Rosetta and The Son) are very different ‘first-person’ texts where the jerky handheld camera takes us inside protagonists’ heads even more directly than what happens here.This Artificial Eye DVD is high quality with excellent visuals and sound. Subtitles are cleanly letterboxed, but aside from filmographies there are no extras. Best buy this as part of the 6 DVD Dardenne brothers set.