Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne: Essays and Interviews

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Committed Cinema

Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews

Edited by

Bert Cardullo

CAMBRIDGE

SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews, Edited by Bert Cardullo This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2009 by Bert Cardullo and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1260-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1260-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Chronology

xiii

Essays Buried Clues, True Grit: On La Promesse and Rosetta Jonathan Rosenbaum

2

Troubling Questions: The Dardennes MikeBartlett

10

The Art and Politics of the Dardenne Brothers Emilie Bickerton

15

Life on Earth: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne Robin Wood

24

Lower Depths, Higher Planes: On the Dardennes' La Promesse, Rosetta, The Son, and UEnfant BertCardullo

30

The Brothers Dardenne: Responding to the Face of the Other DougCummings

55

The Dardenne Brothers: An Argument for a Far More Critical Appraisal, or, What about the "Extenuating Circumstances"? David Walsh 69

Articles Soldiers' Stories: A New Kind of War Film, or Work as a Matter of Life and Death Leslie Camhi 82

vi

Table of Contents

Two Belgian Brothers' Working-Class Heroes JoanDupont

85

Timber!: Carpentry and Le Fils Geoffrey Macnab

89

Auteurist Brothers Who Work Like Cops Manohla Dargis

92

We're the Same: One Person, Four Eyes Xan Brooks

94

Tending UEnfant: The Dardenne Brothers Return with Another Palme d'Or Winner Richard Porton

98

Filmmakers on Film: The Secret of the Dardenne Brothers' Palme d'Or Success Sheila Johnstone

102

The Dardennes DougCummings

106

Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne Gerald Peary

109

The Brothers Believe in Tough Love Philippa Hawker

Ill

Silence Not Quite Golden Stephanie Bunbury

114

The Dardenne Brothers and The Silence ofLorna DaveCalhoun

116

Reality Bites JimWolfreys

119

Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

vii

Interviews Taking the Measure of Human Relationships: An Interview with the Dardenne Brothers Joan and Dennis West

124

Big Brother, Little Brother Matthieu Reynaert

134

The Dardenne Brothers at Cannes: "We Want to Make It Live" KarinBadt

139

Talking to Palme d'Or Winners Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne Geoff Andrew

147

The Terrible Lightness of Social Marginality: An Interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne Robert Sklar

159

Talking to Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne Jonathan Romney

165

Interview: The Dardenne Brothers' Child Margaret Pomeranz

171

Interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Directors of The Silence ofLorna David Walsh 176 Interview: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne Philip Concannon

181

The Cinema of Resistance: An Interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne BertCardullo

188

Filmography Major Feature Film Credits Select Bibliography Index

205 206 209 213

PREFACE

Jean-Pierre Dardenne trained as an actor and his younger brother, Luc, studied philosophy; but they have dedicated themselves to filmmaking since the 1970s. After earning a reputation in their native Belgium for directing socially and politically conscious documentaries, they directed their first fiction feature, Falsch, in 1986. They have also been active as producers and in 1975 founded Derives, a company with more than sixty documentaries to its credit. A second company, Les Films du Fleuve, was formed by the Dardennes in 1994. The brothers hail from Wallonia, the southern, French-speaking region of Belgium that provides the gritty, postindustrial landscape so omnipresent in their films. In the decade since their third fiction feature, La Promesse (1996), became an international success, the unassuming but highly determined Dardennes have ascended to the forefront of a newly revived sociallyconscious European cinema. At a time when filmmaking in Europe, however distinguished, seemed largely unmoored from the social changes wrought by the end of the Soviet empire, La Promesse offered a modest but profound view of illegal immigration and worker exploitation, anchored in the moral complexities of the relationship between a Belgian contractor and his teenaged son. Two prizes at Cannes (the Palme d'Or and Best Actress) for Rosetta (1999)—which conveys the obsessive extent to which a teenaged girl demands a job, a home, and a normal life— consecrated the Dardenne brothers as leading international cineastes. Rosetta was followed by three similarly socially realistic films that are at the same time intimate character portraits: The Son (2002), UEnfant (2005), and The Silence ofLorna (2008). In The Son, the father of a dead son must learn how to father the delinquent who killed his own child. In UEnfant, the young father of a newborn son with his girlfriend sells the baby to a criminal adoption ring—only to relent and retrieve the child, thereby placing himself in debt toward, and danger from, his criminal confederates. (At Cannes, UEnfant was awarded the Palme d'Or, marking the fourth time that a filmmaker—or filmmakers in the Dardennes' case— has won the festival's top prize twice. The previous two-time winners are Bille August, Francis Ford Coppola, and Emir Kusturica.) And The Silence of Lorna revolves around the machinations forced on illegal

X

Preface

immigrants attempting to grab a morsel of the world's wealth—in this case through fake marriages, and even murder, for citizenship. In each of their five feature films since 1996, the Dardennes' rigorous, handheld camerawork and highly selective framing merge with physically intense acting (often by nonprofessionals or virtual unknowns) to evoke a realistic tradition infused with philosophical and spiritual depth—one that hearkens back to both Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero (1947) and Bresson's Pickpocket (1959). Naturalistically shot, impeccably constructed, ethically uncompromising, and emotionally searing, the Dardenne brothers' films give voice to a population often despised or ignored: illegal aliens, shameless slumlords, corrupt officials, smalltime criminals; and they invariably center on the world of work, in the lowly precincts of illegal construction labor, in demeaning entry-level clerical jobs, or in subsistence-pay apprentice training. To such characters the brothers bring a compassionate view born of the understanding that this underclass has, in part, been created by society's higher-ups. These are figures of limited material and social means who, under the most dire circumstances, must grapple with life-and-death decisions. And the films that feature them suggest an ingrained Christian vision through insisting on the transformative possibility of the most debased being. The power of La Promesse, Rosetta, The Son, LfEnfant, and The Silence of Lorna in the end, however, lies in the spontaneous edginess of each scene, the frenetic energy of characters as they confront each other through physical and verbal assault. Indeed, the Dardenne brothers reinvent the notion of character so that we are not among stereotypes of the downtrodden, we are with fumbling, faulty human beings who are trying to survive as best as they can. Rather than confronting notions of good and evil in these works, we get a sense of lost and found. What we have here, in sum, is a new formula for storytelling, with unadorned subjects, unaffected cinematography, and only, in the brothers' words, "the music of the street"—a formula which, while recalling Italian neorealism, is its inverse in the sense that the Dardennes' films contain no explicit critique of "society." Their pictures are finally a search to acquire dignity, to achieve redemption, for oneself as well as for others. Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is the first book in English to treat the work of the Dardenne brothers, and features the best essays and interviews published to date on the two brothers' memorable films. These essays and interviews, by such notables as Robin Wood, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Gerald Peary, and Robert Sklar, are supplemented by a chronology, a filmography, film credits, a bibliography, and a thoroughgoing index. Welcome, then, to this banquet of words


xi

(alas, not of images)—outstanding among them the directors' own—about the cinematic achievement of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

B.C.

CHRONOLOGY

1951:

Jean-Pierre Dardenne born, in the Engis suburb of Lifege, Belgium, on April 21st.

1954:

Luc Dardenne born, in the Awirs suburb of Liege, Belgium, on March 10th.

1969-74:

Luc studies philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain, Jean-Pierre dramatic art at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion (I.A.D.). There they make the acquaintance of Armand Gatti, a theater director, poet, playwright, filmmaker, and committed humanist. He involves the brothers in two of his shows: Le Colonne Durutti and L'Arche d'Adelin.

1975:

The Dardenne brothers found their own production company, "Derives," which will end up producing roughly sixty documentary films (only the major of which will be listed below), which sometimes call selfconscious attention to their form in a way that the Dardennes' later fiction films do not.

1978:

Le chant du rossignol {The Song of the Nightingale), a documentary.

1979:

Lorsque le bateau de Leon M. descendit la Meuse pour la premiere fois (When Leon's Boat First Sailed Down the River Meuse), a documentary.

1980:

Pour que la guerre s'acheve, les murs devaient s'icrouler (For the War to End, the Walls Had to Come Down), a documentary.

1981:

The Dardennes work with Armand Gatti on the film Nous etions tous des noms d'arbres, with Jean-Pierre serving as chief camera assistant and Luc as assistant to

XIV

Chronology the director. R.. . ne repondplus (/?... Doesn't Answer Anymore), a. documentary.

1982:

Legons d'une universite volante (Lessons from a University on the Fly), a documentary.

1983:

Regarde Jonathan (Look at Jonathan), a documentary.

1986:

Falsch (False), adapted from an autobiographical play by the Belgian writer Rene Kalisky, and co-written with Jean Gruault (Frangois Truffaut's screenwriter), signals the Dardennes' switch to fiction filmmaking, though it retains the quasi-Brechtian mode of their documentaries.

1987:

// court, il court le monde (The World Is Racing), a short.

1992:

Je pense a vous (You're on My Mind), a fiction feature, bombs. The brothers had no control over the shooting of this film or of the final cut.

1996:

The Dardenne brothers found "Les Films du Fleuve," which will be the production vehicle for all their future fiction films, as well as the films of other writerdirectors (like those of Solveig Anspach [Stormy Weather], Eugene Green [Le Monde vivant], Bruno Podalydes [The Mystery of the Yellow Room], and Costa-Gavras [Le Couperet]). La Promesse (The Promise) showcases at the Cannes Film Festival during the Quinzaine des Realisateurs. La Promesse wins the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Foreign-Language Film.

1999:

Rosetta wins the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. For her role in this film, Emilie Dequenne wins the Prix d'interpretation feminine at Cannes. Cahiers du Cinema Livres publishes the scripts of Rosetta and La Promesse in one volume.


xv

2002:

Le Fils {The Son). For his role in this film, Olivier Gourmet wins the Prix d'interpr&ation masculine at the Cannes Film Festival.

2005:

L'Enfant {The Child) wins the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Editions de Seuil publishes the Dardennes' working diary, Au dos de nos images, 19912005 {On the Back of Our Images); the scripts of Le Fils and L'Enfant are published in the same volume.

2007:

Dans VObscurite {Darkness), a short.

2008:

Le Silence de Lorna {The Silence of Lorna) wins the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival.

ESSAYS

BURIED CLUES, TRUE GRIT: ON LA PROMESSE AND ROSETTA {CHICAGO READER, 22 AUGUST 1997 & 14 JANUARY 2000) JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Fd never heard of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne before I saw La Promesse (1996), an important and highly involving movie playing at the Music Box this week. But given that they're regional filmmakers working in an unfashionable country, this isn't surprising. Based in Liege—a city in French-speaking western Belgium—the two brothers, both in their midforties, started out in the '70s as assistants to Belgian director and playwright Armand Gatti. They then made leftist videos about local urban and labor issues, followed by documentary films for TV about local antiNazi resistance, local workers' struggles in the '60s, and a history of Polish immigration between the '30s and early '80s. In 1986 they turned to fiction, filming a play called Falsch, and their film made the rounds of a few international festivals. In 1991 they did a more experimental feature, Je pense a vous (I'm Thinking of You), co-written by the distinguished New Wave screenwriter Jean Gruault, that apparently sank without a trace after playing at a few French festivals and being slaughtered by the Belgian press. They finally made a splash with La Promesse at the directors' fortnight at Cannes last year, then at thirty-two other festivals, including Toronto and New York. Their favorite movies include Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero, Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Pialat's Uenfance nue, Coppola's The Conversation, Techine's Thieves, Loach's Kes, Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Kieslowski's The Decalogue, Straub-Huillet's Not Reconciled, and Oshima's Cruel Stories of Youth, and they also have kind words for Cassavetes, Kazan, Mizoguchi, and Pasolini. La Promesse (The Promise), shot on the outskirts of Liege in Seraing, centers on a boy of fifteen named Igor (Jeremie Renier)—the son of a single parent named Roger (Olivier Gourmet), a slum landlord who rents to recently arrived immigrants, some of them illegal. (We never learn anything about Igor's mother, but this is one of the movie's key structuring absences.) Igor works as an apprentice at a garage and filling station whenever he isn't


3

called away to help his father, but he's called away so often that he doesn't hold the job for long. In the opening sequence he's pumping gas for an old woman, then stealing her wallet from the front seat of her car while pretending to check her ignition; he buries the wallet after removing the cash. Then his boss shows him how to use a soldering iron, until a honk from Roger's van calls him away. He and his father go to pick up a fresh batch of immigrants and their belongings, including a woman from Burkina Faso (Assita Ou&iraogo) and her baby son; her husband is already one of Roger's tenants (Rasmane Ouddraogo; no relation to either Assita or director Idrissa Ougdraogo). On the way back, Roger stops at a hospital, gets out, and pushes through a long line of patients saying his son has just had an accident. Why he needs to stop at the hospital may have been clarified by a subsequent detail in the plot, but if it was I missed it. Yet this ambiguity isn't so much a flaw as a cornerstone of the film's method, because the way we arrive at most of the story information given above is through inference, not through a didactic laying out of plot points. The film is easy to follow, but it doesn't proceed by narrative spoonfeeding. It's here that the Dardennes' documentary background pays off. Like Rossellini, Pialat, Cassavetes, Loach, and Kieslowski, they often proceed as if they were investigative reporters, plunging into the thick of a situation and trusting us to figure out the basic facts for ourselves (including, for instance, the intricacies of laws governing Belgian immigration). At the same time, they have a compelling sense of narrative and dramatic rhythm that carries us along while we're picking up clues. In Cahiers du cinema Jean-Marc Lalanne aptly notes, "Through the mastery of its narrative effects, its capacity to describe the functioning of a microcosm and to fictionalize it, La Promesse almost has the attractions of a superspiffy American movie"—though when he later compares the moral testing of Igor to "a breathless action film . . . with a cadence as infernal as Bruce Willis in Die Hard' I part company with him. Amidou—the husband from Burkina Faso, an illegal immigrant, unlike his wife and son—has gambled away part of the month's rent. Roger, who doles out under-the-table jobs to illegal immigrants, puts Amidou to work on repairs in an adjacent building, planning to deduct the rent from his wages. A labor inspector is about to turn up, and Igor, who's just lost his garage job, warns every illegal immigrant to vacate the building before he arrives. Then Amidou falls from the high scaffold he's working on. Close to death, he asks Igor to promise to take care of his wife and child, and Igor agrees. Igor wants to take him to the hospital, but Roger, fearing reprisals by immigration authorities, hides Amidou's body instead, and

4

On La Promesse and Rosetta

later gets Igor to help bury him under cement. It's the second burial in the movie (the wallet was the first), and in every respect the movie's turning point, because afterward Igor proceeds in every way he knows to honor his promise to Amidou. Long before Amidou's accident we see Igor spying on Assita in their room, but whether he's later honoring her late husband's wish or shifting his allegiance from his father to an unlikely mother surrogate is one of the many issues the film leaves open. The complex accommodations between Igor and Assita as he both lies to her about her husband's whereabouts and refuses to abandon her (as Roger insists he do) provide the compelling drama of the film's second part. In explaining Igor's change of heart, which ultimately leads him to reject his father, the Dardennes cite an exchange between the character Marcel and his mother in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: "How," asks the mother, "can you be guiltier than anyone in the eyes of all? There are murderers and brigands. What crimes have you committed to blame yourself more than everyone else?" "My dear mother, my deepest love, know that everyone is guilty in everyone's eyes. I do not know how to explain it to you, but I feel that is so, and it torments me." Rightly or wrongly, the standard idea we have about most left-wing narrative art is that the storyteller has a thesis to propound and that the story shapes that thesis. But the Dardennes view Igor as mostly a mystery—as they do Assita when she picks through the entrails of a chicken or visits a seer trying to discover where her missing husband is. The filmmakers treat both characters in a matter-of-fact way, but they don't claim to know much more about them than we do. Part of the excitement of La Promesse has to do with the way they share their curiosity with us. The drawback of this approach is that they can take their lack of knowledge only so far. For one thing, I find it impossible to imagine what transpires between Assita and Igor after the final shot, which suggests that the film ends at the precise point when its imagination reaches its limits. However, this approach does make possible a kind of comparative anthropology that combines compassion with a lack of sentimentality and allows us to discover each character in relation to the other. The Dardennes also seem to know and understand like the back of their hands the world both characters live in, including the factors that force them together and ultimately make them both pariahs. Inviting us to share this knowledge as well as their curiosity about two isolated individuals, they discover a world where conversation gradually becomes possible, not only


5

between these two characters but between us and the film—a conversation about theses still in the making. As for Rosettay let me first offer you the following email message from the film critic Nicole Brenez: I saw Rosetta three weeks ago, and haven't recovered from it since. In fact, I didn't see any film since the Dardennes', except films for work. It moves me to the heart of my heart, this film about the necessity of life, the impossibility of morality, the soil of human experience. [A teaching colleague], told me that he couldn't watch it because he thought too much about [Robert Bresson's] Mouchette, but precisely, it's at last Mouchette today, our Mouchette, the one we deserve, without any heaven and any transcendence. Her scream, "Mama! Y'a d'la boue! Y'a d'la boue!" ["Mama! It's full of mud! It's full of mud!"] haunts me, I can't forget it, it's exactly the despair of teing in life without any pathos, any margin, just real life in the immediacy of the impulse. The '80s practically ended with the euphoric takeover of Tiananmen Square by more than a million demonstrators led by students, many with access to fax machines, though a brutal government crackdown followed. And the '90s ended with the disruption of the World Trade Organization's meeting in Seattle by an extremely diverse coalition formed through email. It wasn't a throwback to the '60s—we're living in an era of greater economic disparities, where class is in some ways becoming a more significant distinction than nationality or language—but at least it suggested that people aren't powerless and sometimes can triumph over the designs of multinational corporations. Forms of communication are thus no longer shaped by cold-war prototypes. Products and operations rather than national ideologies have made much of the world kin, and those products and operations function less like the front line of an invading army than like a long highway anyone can travel down—which may make them destroyers of national ideologies. Even the multinationals are changing. Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's outlets in Japan aren't simply or necessarily promoting the American way of life. They sell corn soup at McDonald's in Tokyo— which means they're using American d6cor to sell a Japanese product and thereby promoting the Japanese way of life. Which isn't to say that way of life hasn't changed; who's to say what is the Japanese way of life anymore? Hot cans of corn soup and of Pokka espresso are sold everywhere in Japanese vending machines. Pokka is brewed in American Canyon, California (though if you want to buy it in Chicago you have to go to an Asian supermarket), and the Pokka people can hardly be said to be promoting an Italian way of life.

6


All of this is a roundabout way of underscoring my point that it's silly for the mainstream American press to go on assuming that foreign movies are neither relevant to American audiences nor important. Rosetta, a Belgian film that's starting its second and final week at the Music Box, won the top prize at Cannes, the world's top film festival, and its eighteenyear-old lead, Emilie Dequenne, shared the best-actress award. Its story, subject, and heroine are probably more relevant to the lives of most Americans—and have more physical presence and pack a bigger emotional punch—than the story, subject, and characters of most current Hollywood films. Nevertheless, most American critics have refused to give this current American release even a fraction of the attention they lavish on any American movie. An American friend who recently returned from Europe told me Rosetta has already inspired a new Belgian law known as "Plan Rosetta," which prohibits employers from paying teenaged workers less than the minimum wage (a Belgian news source on the Internet reports this passed on November 12). But the American press hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, considered this fact worth reporting. What can we conclude from the passing of this law? One person at a discussion following a preview thought it meant that European moviegoers are more serious than their American counterparts, but I disagree. I think the different impact a movie like Rosetta has in Europe is mainly a consequence of how it's treated by the press. For instance, Dequenne appeared on the cover of France's leading rock weekly late last September, but she could never conceivably appear on the cover of Spin or Rolling Stone. The film's reputation and therefore its power in Belgium are easy to account for. Local pride at winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes gave the movie a high profile—and helped it avoid being swamped by the millions of publicity dollars spent by Hollywood studios to ensure that Belgian moviegoers were more aware of the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Bond shenanigans. In this country there's practically nothing in the press to prevent it from being swamped by even more millions of publicity dollars. It's therefore understandable that American audiences often wind up confusing promotional presence with cultural importance, since promotional presence seems to be the only gauge the mainstream media have for determining cultural importance. It's meaningless to claim that American audiences "prefer" End of Days or The World Is Not Enough to Rosetta given that most Americans have been bombarded with advertising for those profoundly inconsequential movies but haven't heard a word about Rosetta. Moreover, the very fact that millions had to be spent advertising End of Days and The World Is Not Enough actually helps


7

demonstrate that the media bias in favor of dumb big-budget entertainment doesn't suffice to sell it to the masses. From its opening seconds, Rosetta makes it clear that its heroine is angry—before it tells us who she is or what she's angry about. Alain Marcoen's virtuoso handheld camera, which will stay close to her throughout the film, follows as she slams a door, strides through the industrial workplace where she's just been laid off for obscure reasons, and then assaults her boss when he insists that she leave. After taking the bus back to the trailer park where she lives with her alcoholic mother, Rosetta stops briefly in the woods and methodically takes off her shoes and puts on a pair of boots hidden behind a large rock in a drainpipe. This ritual is repeated throughout the film, marking the transition between her work and her even more solitary home life, where most of her time is spent keeping her mother away from booze and sex (her mother's principal method of acquiring booze), fishing in a nearby muddy creek, and soothing her stomach pains, usually by warming her belly with a hair dryer. After Rosetta meets a teenaged boy named Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione) who operates a waffle stand and has romantic designs on her, the plot thickens, but not predictably. Riquet finds her work for a brief spell, but she regards him more as a competitor than a friend; when he accidentally falls into the muddy creek trying to help her, she almost lets him drown because she wants his job. Rosetta is a grim character in a grim set of circumstances, yet the film's writer-directors, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, are so ruthlessly unsentimental, uncynical, and physical in their approach to her life that we experience it viscerally before we get a chance to reflect on its meaning. Toward the end of the film Rosetta has to carry her mother across the trailer park, and it's extraordinary how much Marcoen's camera style makes us feel the weight of her body. The physicality of the film as a whole often becomes overwhelming; if s as if the Dardennes had converted the physical facts of Rosetta's existence into something resembling a theme-park ride. To a lesser extent, this was also true of their previous feature, La Promesse, Perhaps what's most distinctive about the Dardenne brothers—middleaged leftists based in Lifege, a city in eastern, French-speaking Belgium, with a background in political videos and TV documentaries—is their utter lack of didacticism about their characters combined with a curiosity about them that gives them a novelistic density, ambiguity, and unpredictability. One comes away with the impression that Igor and Rosetta are both volatile and vibrant works in progress, existential protagonists in the

8


purest sense. The Dardennes also seem to know the working-class locations in and around Liege like the backs of their hands, so their stories almost always seem plausible. These stories are edgy in part because the Dardennes never seem to know more about their characters than they show. The moments at which La Promesse and Rosetta end appear to be precisely the moments at which the filmmakers choose to stop imagining what comes next. Yet it's fascinating that it's impossible to guess what Igor will do or say five seconds after La Promesse ends, and the same thing is true of Rosetta at the end of Rosetta. Some might consider this a limitation, particularly given the depths of the characterizations found in, for instance, Erich von Stroheim's Greed. But I regard it as a strength that the Dardennes' instinct for fiction closely parallels their instinct for documentary and that they refuse to claim more knowledge of their characters than they're ready to impart. Their work with Dequenne suggests that she operates the same way, with the same tight focus; interviews with the three of them have revealed that they have somewhat different interpretations of portions of the story that were deliberately left in the dark: the identity of Rosetta's father, the source of her stomach pains, the significance of thefinalscene. Nicole Brenez and her colleague aren't the only critics comparing Rosetta to Bresson's Mouchette, and the parallels in terms of plot and character are hard to ignore. But there are substantial differences in style and philosophical meaning, and the stories end in drastically different ways. The Catholic context lurking in the background of Bresson's film and, I strongly suspect, Georges Bernanos's source novel couldn't be further from the social coordinates of the Dardennes' universe, and it's no slur to say that Mouchette could never have changed the labor laws of France. Moreover, the Dardennes' rigorous adherence to their heroine's viewpoint is a world apart from Bresson's more distanced compassion. Significantly, one comes away from Rosetta with almost no firm physical or emotional recollection of the heroine's mother (Anne Yernaux)—not because the camera ignores her, but because one feels that the Dardennes, like Rosetta, have given up on her. Mouchette's invalid mother, who dies over the course of the film, leaves a much stronger impression. For that matter, the profound sense of mystery evoked by Bresson's characters, including Mouchette, can't be equated with the curiosity provoked by Igor and Rosetta, especially because Bresson's characters always register as fixed essences and never as works in progress. When Rosetta rejects Riquet's offer of a beer, then suddenly asks him for one and drains it in a single gulp, we're led to believe that her previous avoidance of both liquor and sex might be motivated by a fear of

Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne becoming like her mother—and by a desire to succumb to both temptations that frightens her even more. In this wonderfully observant and beautifully performed comic sequence, Riquet's clumsy attempts to show off first his skill at gymnastics and then his skill at drumming, followed by his efforts to get Rosetta to dance, are met by her with amusement, then bravado, and finally clunky gestures. This scene gives us a sense of the wonderful things the Dardennes can do with actors, which are a far cry from Bresson's own formidable yet very different accomplishments with nonactors. Rosetta is alive with a sense of urgency as well as currency, even though there's nothing remotely preachy about it. American reviewers who insist on treating it as minor and then treat something like Dogme as a heady challenge seem to be implying that we're all such infantile escapists at heart that we can't possibly be interested in a movie that concerns anything as real as finding a job. I've heard that one critic has attacked Rosetta for not being Brechtian. I'm tempted to counter that the veritable theme song of Brecht's Threepenny Opera—"First comes bread, then comes morals"—could easily serve as one of Rosetta's rationales for her behavior. But then I recall Hannah Arendt's gloss on how this line was received in pre-Hitler Germany: It was "greeted with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons. The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expression of the banality by which it lived; the elite applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior and wonderful fun. The effect of the work was exactly the opposite of what Brecht had sought by it." I don't think it's possible to misread Rosetta in any of the ways outlined by Arendt, so perhaps I'm misreading the film critic. Clearly Rosetta isn't esoteric or cerebral or difficult to understand; it isn't remotely boring or even slightly pretentious. Its only crimes are that it isn't in English (though it doesn't have much dialogue anyway), it has something powerful to say about what's happening right now across the planet, and millions haven't been spent promoting it. N

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TROUBLING QUESTIONS: T H E D ARDENNES (CLOSE-UP FILM,

2006)

MIKE B ARTLETT

Two troubling questions raised in recent months: The first from the BBC4 program, Lefties, which recalled the golden age of radical TV drama in the '60s and '70s. Play For Today and other institutions allowed writers the freedom to explore current social problems, often in raw, provocative style, and this freedom spilled over into British cinema where portrayals of the working class became more commonplace. But where are those left-wing polemics now? Where are those works that attacked the status quo in order to make a better world? And then there is that awkward yet haunting film, Munich. Yes, it's more liberal hand-wringing from Mr. Spielberg, come to tell us about the ills of naughty terrorists and vengeful states. And yet. .. the insistence on "home," the way this idea is articulated through meals and the breaking of bread together, and how violence comes to warp and overshadow this most basic of shared pleasures. And the character of Michel Lonsdale, the French paterfamilias, whose home is an idealized portrait of civilized life, but who has become bitter and amoral. And who, over dinner, bemoans the waste of men's lives to replace "Vichy scum with Gaullist scum" and the concurrent rise of a younger generation stuffed with so-called liberal platitudes learnt from popular culture, not experience. Before we forget Spielberg's film altogether, let us admit that, in this figure alone, he has created a formidable metaphor of modern Europe, grown cynical in the face of compromise and self-serving on both sides of the political spectrum. In Blair's Britain, for example, where is the place for the man on the Left who believes in patriotism, heritage and the tradition of beauty? Where the place for the man on the Right who is concerned with human rights and the freedom of speech being slowly but surely eradicated? Where, in short, does the European who falls in the interstices between the vulgar and outdated concepts of Left and Right find a voice?


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The answer to both questions, I believe, lies across the Channel in Belgium—brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. After working in a cement factory to raise money, they began filming strikes and union meetings in the '70s, then graduated into documentaries for television. Their first fiction feature Falsch appeared in 1986, but they have said that the first film where they successfully achieved what they wanted was La Promesse (1996). This, and the three films that have followed, have placed them at the apex of modern cinema, and it's these four works that I'd like to concentrate on. Let's start with the titles-^77ie Promise, Rosetta, The Son, The Child. Bold, emphatic, unambiguous. But on closer examination, they yield different interpretations. The Promise is that given by a teenaged boy to a dying immigrant worker to look after his wife, but it's also the promise of a young man being wasted because of his attachment to a father who preys on such immigrants. The Son is a child killed by a joyrider, but the joyrider himself takes his place when he enlists at the father's carpentry workshop. Rosetta's name implies that she is a code to be broken, her uncompromising behavior and marginalized, trailer-trash lifestyle a foreign language for most viewers. And L'Enfant is not so much the baby that a poor couple share, but the unruly, petty criminal father who can blithely sell that child for a quick fix of cash. Their films bear no little resemblance to British social realism—stories of downtrodden people, on the breadline, inhabiting grim estates and grubby streets. But, at this point, I should admit that I've never much cared for that strain of "kitchen sink" drama—the collected works of Ken Leigh and Mike Loach (or is it the other way around?) Why, then, do I rate the Dardennes so highly? Is it just because I want my working-class strife in French accents, the exoticism of another country in place of a Sheffield car park? After all, their plots are only basic melodramas—bad boy makes good, girl realizes error of her ways—just as their British counterparts are heart-warming stories of triumph over adversity. The difference lies in that last title, L'Enfant. Whereas we're used to the "ignorant folk with a heart of gold," the Dardennes present a tougher message—that poverty makes children of us all. Their characters are grasping and desperate—ready to betray a Mend for a job at a waffle store, ready to sublet their own flat and put their wife and child out of a home. There's no need to present a caricatured vision of yuppie wealth—a la the landlord in Naked (1993)—or hide the truth of working-class life—that they were among the first to purchase mobile phones and satellite dishes— to make us sympathize with the plight of their protagonists. Leigh and Loach stack the cards in their victims' favor—they're made utterly

12

Troubling Questions

destitute and utterly noble. They don't challenge their liberal audience but serve up to them their own fantasy of "gritty reality"—in other words, preaching to the converted. But the Dardennes' is a tough love—it shows that the very systems that the Left rail against make people shrewd, calculating, ruthless. They want the audience to earn their urge to change society by showing people as they really are, not by flattering pre-ordained ideas and mollycoddling them through the film. In this sense, there's one British director who is close to them in spirit: Alan Clarke. Clarke's films are as grim and as gritty as you could wish for, but crucially, they put liberals as much as conservatives on the back foot. By following the fortunes of a racist skinhead (Made in Britain, 1983) or a violent borstal inmate (Scum, 1977, 1979) and making them as articulate as their opponents, Clarke, too, forces us to test our views, not indulge them. And he shares a similar cinematic style with the Dardennes, particularly in the filming of actors. Fascinated by SteadyCam, Clarke found that he could show the antagonism between his characters merely through long tracking shots of them walking, their nervous movement signaling hidden fury. This is translated into the opening of Rosetta where the handheld camera almost chases a young girl down a flight of stairs before having a door slammed in its face. No film starts more urgently, nor intimates so immediately the uncompromising energy of its protagonist. In The Son, Olivier Gourmet is constantly filmed from behind, the bulk of his shoulder filling the screen as the camera tries to peek round at the object of his curiosity. Throughout the Dardennes' work, the field of vision is limited. In a genuinely thrilling car chase in L'Enfant, the viewer seldom sees beyond the motorbike of the pursued—there's no cross-cutting, there are no exciting overhead shots. The Dardennes do not want us to have any more information than their characters—that way, we are brought into greater empathy with them but we're also made to see how the deprivations they suffer prevent them from seeing the wider picture. That's why their stories are not placed in any social context. The urgent necessities of life—food, money—keep them on a merry-go-round of activity that precludes them from the luxuries of debate. Just watching their lives played out as realistically as possible should be enough for the audience to understand their case. Hardship is signaled through little details—Rosetta using tissue paper to fill the cracks in her caravan window, a father having time to take his child for a walk because the dole queue his wife's waiting in is so long. Simple metaphors suffice—whenever someone crosses a road, it's to the


13

"other side," the margins of society that most of us don't see, a river shelter or a trailer camp. And there's no music—even the end credits arrive in stark, black silence. The Dardennes want to factor out anything that doesn't belong to the story they're telling, either within or without the narrative. Once the movie is over, there's no concept of how it might go on afterwards—the off-screen world is not so much unimportant as nonexistent. This has led to comparisons with Robert Bresson, who ruthlessly purged his films of what he called "screens," easy generators of emotion like soundtrack music, baroque camera movement, expressionistic performance. Indeed, the Dardennes have stressed that they share his interest in producing a story with an "economy of means". But they've also admitted that they've.come to "detest" the comparison because it obscures their own agenda. ^ True, the conclusion of UEnfant clearly recalls that of Pickpocket (1959) where a young man kisses his girl through the bars of a prison cell. But in Bresson, the focus is on the man's redemption, a very Catholic sense of grace permeating the endings of his films. But the Dardennes simply show a couple crying and making up before brutally cutting away. There's no indication that they can or will change, but it's a more human resolution, the accent being on their mutual affection for each other, not any abstract concept of justice. French critic Nicole Brenez has said of Rosetta that it is "Mouchette today, out Mouchette, the one we deserve, without any heaven and any transcendence." She says that with an air of despair, but I would argue that this is something positive. The characters are no longer archetypes, trapped into representing a particular concept, but real people. They're frustrated, often angry, but they're also warm, boisterous, funny, not the impassive zombies of Bresson's world. And all they're trying to do is make a connection. x It's instructive to make another comparison, this time with a contemporary European filmmaker, Michael Haneke. He, too, offers a superficially ascetic vision of modern Europe, riddled with racism, violence and greed, again framed in silent, black credits. But Haneke's approach is to observe the action from a distance, a cool objectivity being implied. There is no sense of empathy or closeness with his characters, either in the storylines or use of camera. In other words, he detaches himself from the drama, his absence denying any kind of guiding personality to the film. Some might say this is Haneke's strength and, indeed, I think he prides himself on his directorial coolness, to the point where he refuses to offer his audience any answers, or intimations of where these answers can be found. But, this way, the filmmaker doesn't have to get his hands dirty, doesn't have to wade in and show his hand. It's

14

Troubling Questions

as if he sits back, arms folded, as the lights go up, pompously expecting a response from his audience, assuming by implication a position of superiority. The warmth of the Dardennes, by contrast, comes from the clear identification they have with both their protagonists and the world they inhabit. It's no surprise to find that they always film in and around local town Seraing, with inexperienced actors or friends, and using stories that they've come across in everyday life. Their films feel informed by real experience in much the same way as the documentaries of Humphrey Jennings. Theirs is a new cinema of the Left—still harsh and biting, but infused with a genuine curiosity in human nature and fellow feeling. And it's a part of a burgeoning movement in film, one that has taken lessons from the old masters like Bresson but planed away their severity to produce a softer but no less committed humanism. Think of Nuri Bilge Ceylan in Turkey, whose Uzak (2002) pays homage to Tarkovsky and Kiarostami, yet brings their style home to a simple tale of two cousins who can't get on. Or in the UK, and admittedly at a lower level of achievement, Shane Meadows' A Room for Romeo Brass (1999), which brings us back to where we came in, the "kitchen sink" drama, but done with freshness, vigor and a pleasing lack of portentousness. It's a new kind of cinema for a new kind of Europe.

THE ART AND POLITICS OF THE DARDENNE BROTHERS (CiNEASTEy

SPRING

2006)

EMILffiBlCKERTON He has sold his newborn son. Knees hugging his chest, Bruno sits in an empty concrete alcove on the bare banks of the Meuse River. Hollow traffic noises fill the air. The young mother, Sonia, returns. Jimmy? Where is Jimmy? We watch as Bruno explains, but he doesn't share our shock, brushing the act off: "We'll make another," he suggests casually. What can Sonia possibly do, or say? Her child gone, exchanged for cash by his father. But she doesn't speak, doesn't fill our horrified silence with comforting explosions of anger, or violent punches against Bruno. She collapses, her body—previously so powerfully in motion, marching through the streets, pushing the pram, banging on house doors, defiant— becomes limp, it fades to the ground under the sheer weight of emotion: her child has been sold, no words can express the disaster in her. L'Enfant shows how the genuine depths of human emotion can be expressed through moving images. It is the sixth feature film from the Belgian directors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and adds to an already remarkable body of work. The film won them their second Palme d'Or in seven years at Cannes. In May 2005, Luc also released Au dos de nos images: 1991-2005, a collection of diary entries written throughout those creative years. The publication is a welcome one, shedding light on an otherwise very discreet, private working partnership that is becoming increasingly important to understand. In each of their pictures they start from the same, simple question: what does it really mean to be human today? They succeed in answering this through precision, discipline, and the very way they use the camera and carefully construct their scenes. They take single characters or a family relationship and concentrate entirely on these. Their films have little dialogue, no music ("It blinds you to the image"), and the most spare of narratives (they refuse to draw any "dramatic line that would stifle [the] life" of their protagonists). Simplicity is an essential component. The Dardennes concentrate our emotions,

16

The Art and Politics of the Dardenne Brothers

which in turn allows us time to reflect on a single predicament or event. Also, we are given the space to sense the very rhythm of the film, we feel and follow the movements of bodies, are conscious of surrounding traffic noises, and notice the little habits and accessories that define the characters.

Documentary Days Three years separate the brothers. Jean-Pierre born in 1951 and Luc in 1954, they grew up in the industrial town of Seraing, part of the Frenchspeaking province of Liege, Belgium. The Meuse River runs through it, and this area—where they first "kissed girls and became adult"—has provided the backdrop for all their films since 1996. Jean-Pierre studied drama at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion in Brussels, and Luc, philosophy. In the early seventies Jean-Pierre met Armand Gatti, the poet and director of Uenclos (1961) and it was Gatti who first encouraged the brothers to work together—"He brought us out of our daydreaming, threw us into the poem . . . taught us to start from our truth"—involving them in two of his theatrical shows, La Colonne Durutti and UArche d'Adelin. In 1975 the Dardennes set up Derives, a production company that became the outlet for the sixty or so documentaries they have made together. These works cover diverse historical events including anti-Nazi resistance groups, Polish immigration, underground newspapers, and the 1960 general labor strike in Belgium. All grounded in community-based politics, they were often screened at union meetings. In 1994 the brothers founded a second company, Les Films du Fleuve, which has since produced their fiction features, as well as those by other directors. They explain their move from documentary to fiction as coming from a desire "to push the limits of possibility and raise questions" that the former doesn't allow. Increasingly they saw their challenge differently to the one posed by documentary, they wanted to do something that could bring more out of reality, because "the problem is not painting life but creating a living painting." Feature films allow them greater freedom to invent characters and work with actors—they can reconstruct reality rather than just recount it.

Feature Films and Working Methods Their two earliest features, Falsch (1986) and Je pense a vous (1992), are now rarely discussed by the brothers, more first drafts, with the latter work especially remembered only for the difficult lessons it taught them:


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always retain control over casting, shooting, and editing, keep to a small budget and team. The creation of Les Films du Fleuve came on the back of their "unfortunate adventure," as Luc described Je pense a vous. Subsequently they have made four features—La Promesse (1996), Rosetta (1999), Le Fils (2002), and UEnfant (2005). La Promesse tells the story of the relationship of a teenaged boy (Igor, played by Jerdmie Renier) with his father, Roger (Olivier Gourmet), who houses illegal immigrants and employs them in building work. Roger covers up an accident on site that leaves one worker dead. In the process Igor makes a secret promise to the dying man to take care of his widow, Assita, and their newborn child. Fulfilling this promise forces Igor into adulthood, as he must choose to act against his father. Rosetta (played by Emilie Dequenne), even more simply, is a young woman's fight to "stay standing." She is determined to find employment and not "fall in the hole," not disappear from society and be engulfed by her own humiliated situation: living in a caravan park with her alcoholic mother. "Rosetta moves, moves, moves," she is "in a state of war," and the camera follows her every step. Le Fils continued the distinctive camera work and from-the-back shots used for Rosetta to tell the story this time of Olivier (Gourmet), a carpenter who teaches the trade in a special school for recently released young offenders. He accepts a new boy, Francis (Morgan Marinne), but this boy was responsible for the death of Olivier's own son five years ago. Yet he still takes Francis as an apprentice and the film explores why. Finally, last year's release, L'Enfant, focused on Bruno's (J6r6ime Renier) process of renouncing his life of petty crime and fulfilling instead, consciously, his role as a father. This is done through the exploration of his decision, and subsequent repentance, to sell his newborn son. The Dardennes tend to reuse their actors (Gourmet, Renier) and nearly always cast nonprofessionals. In these four films they gave Gourmet and Renier their first major parts, and Dequenne, Marinne, and Deborah Francois (Sonia in L'Enfant) their first acting roles. Their technical team, as well as their settings, has remained mostly the same for each picture, too—Marie-Hflene Dozo (editor), Denis Freyd (producer and screenwriter), and Alain Marcoen (director of photography). The small group and budget, along with the single location and selection of actors, is a very conscious choice, a filmmaking ethic, almost, as it is the product of the brothers' relationship with cinema and what they aspire to achieve. Specifically they want to distance themselves from becoming part of a vast industry, drawn into big budgets and studio demands that aim only to

18


produce successful box-office films. Luc reflects on this intermittently in Au dos de nos images. It's not that they disregard the importance of public reception to their works but, rather, that they don't begin with the aspiration to please the spectator. They start instead from their character or the concrete relationship in the film and focus on this. Public approval may or may not follow. "Our question is not: will the spectator love thefilm?but: the film, will it love the spectator?" By the same token they don't want to take art away from the screen (making shocking or harrowingfilmsthat are hard to watch), rather, they want to bring it back, but in a way relevant to the current period. Hence what they mean by "today's contemporary paradox: the aestheticization of reality requires the de-aestheticization of art." Getting out of this paradox involves no less care put into the presentation of the film, but a shift in priorities: it is important to make things appear real, whilst doing so requires the same agonizing decisions of any creative director over wardrobes, words, and editing. This aspiration to develop an appropriate cinematographic form for today requires particular strategies, including prying the image away from its current torpor, its lazy life as fodder for movie stars and recording melodrama. Fiction, the brothers suggest, must be separated anew from fact because television has had an irrevocable impact on the spectator's relationship with cinema, the latter losing a little of its magical quality. "The posture of the viewer has been transported into the cinema auditorium. Art and everyday life are becoming confused. The ramp between the two is disappearing." An entry in Au dos de nos images from 1995 sets out a key goal: to "make a film before which the audience forgets to eat or drink."

New Bodies The cult of the movie star has a stifling effect on the potential power of cinema. The famous face often invoked to sell a film actually blocks what the image might be able to communicate. Using unknown actors allows the brothers to sidestep "this vast cloning industry that means nothing new can enter the cinematographic world . . . we must get out of this . . . find new bodies." As Le Fils most eloquently achieved, starting instead from the body and filming the back of the protagonist or the nape of his neck, catching only glimpses of a face, can serve to express emotions and thoughts that straight dialog or full-frontal shots often fail to achieve. This distinctive method is integral to the brothers' work and Luc writes about it at length, especially during the making of Le Fils.


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Why does Olivier accept Francis as apprentice? Does he want revenge? To kill? Or perhaps to forgive? For so much of the film the character simply does not know. In turn, as spectators, we experience this confusion and searching through watching the enigma of Gourmet on screen. His internal uncertainty is lucidly communicated as we are mostly shown his body, his back. By "putting the spectator in front of the mystery," creating "the impossibility of knowing [and] seeing" means we search even more to understand, and by virtue of this become utterly implicated in the film. The Dardennes are working to "spoil" today's images "that fail to arrive" because the spectator has already seen them so many times and knows those smiling, frightened, or concentrating faces by heart—"the uniqueness of each is no longer able to break through stereotypes of expression." Literally the brothers have turned their backs—filming this very act—on what is seen too much, "the face . . . too framed, too coded, too sold, too publicized." They hope their method of filming might let in "the human rays."

Politics and Victims In light of their subject matter and this approach, it isn't surprising that the brothers are often described as political or socially conscious filmmakers. They focus on the marginalized or ddclassd in society—black market employers, immigrants, the unemployed, ybung offenders, and teenaged parents, all shot in the postindustrial landscape of eastern Belgium. There are recurring concerns, in particular the transmission of skills and lessons, especially focusing on the journey to adulthood, the role of parents for future generations, and the continued importance of employment for status and a sense of self in contemporary society. Rosetta had such an impact that it even spurred a new law, passed in Belgium in 1999 by Minister of Labor and Socialist Party member Laurette Onkelinx. "Plan Rosetta" targeted youth unemployment by intending to offer all young people a job no less than six months after leaving school. However, it is not so much their subject matter that makes the Dardenne brothers' work political, but more the way their films explore certain emotions or situations and the humanist vision that subsequently emerges. What the Dardennes represent is the way cinema can be political today, their real originality coming from their refusal to be cynical and struggle against what they call the loss of confidence in man. This can't be achieved by making characters mouthpieces for particular ideas or representative of predicaments and struggles. This appeal to class consciousness is an old strategy and it is the lack of such an appeal in the

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Dardennes' work that makes them so interesting today. "Thank you for having loved Rosetta" Luc said, after receiving the Palme d'Or in 1999. Thank you, he was saying, for watching and engaging with the film in the way we had hoped, for receiving our address and sympathizing with the girl on screen. That it was possible to engage with her, or indeed any of their characters, testifies to the universal qualities of the Dardennes* films. Yes, they focus on the declasse; yes, the films may have political consequences. They are not, however, addressing a specific group or class, or attacking a particular policy. Rather, the brothers explore a certain emotion or predicament in a way that allows anyone, on the grounds of common humanity, to empathize and see themselves through the characters on screen. ' If their work has political repercussions it's a byproduct and not the aim of their work. "We don't make movies to change the world," Luc said in an interview shortly after Rosetta. "We hope that the world is going to change, but we don't use movies to do that. If you have [such] an objective . . . you tend to manipulate . . . [film becomes] propaganda... It's like publicity that tries to encourage you to buy [a] brand." After a film by the Dardennes, as spectators we emerge "calmed, healed," which is how Luc describes the experience of seeing an important film. We leave the cinema "with the simple feeling of being a human amongst humans. Later the memory of this moment returns to us as a moment of happiness." The brothers achieve this, but this is not to ignore that their films also deeply unsettle. In Rosetta, for example, the moment she starts to move we follow and try to make sense of her actions but at the end we're thrown back in our seats, forced to deal with the journey we have just witnessed. If the brothers have concentrated on a similar selection of characters so far it's because theirs are the experiences they know about. The same setting of Seraing in Belgium is also chosen because of its familiarity and, as Gatti taught them, it is best to start from this when dealing with fiction, if you're to go on to say anything true. Of course, some aspects of the film industry and the media, as we have seen, do rile the brothers. That the declasse are such a blind spot, cinematically and socially, is particularly disturbing for them. Either they are ignored or given charity, yet both, they argue, annihilate them as active subjects capable of shaping their own futures. Echoing the criticisms of the late French critic, Serge Daney, the Dardennes are scathing about what they see as the aestheticization of poverty or famine on screen—the manipulative pictures of starving children put to pop songs for example, does little more than nourish a vision of a powerless victim. "Filming the body of someone starving is, for the media, the same as filming a mute body," so "filming a human


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being . . . who refuses to be reduced to the symbol of suffering, who refuses that pity be felt towards him, filming this human being has become an act of cinematographic resistance against the contempt of a man who holds onto the morbid pity contained in these images, derived from a victim-centered aesthetic.'* What is so remarkable and quite unprecedented about the brothers' work so far is that they have achieved this cinematographic resistance, depicting characters without transforming them from subjects into victims. Dignified is perhaps the most fitting word to describe their cinema, as we are able to grasp the reasons for a character's actions. In L'Enfant, for example, rather than dwell on his mistake, the Dardennes are interested in how Bruno comes to understand his act as such. They explore the sources of his final repentance. Where does this sense of morality come from? Given his environment it would have been comprehensible that he never felt any remorse but continued his amoral life of petty crime. Yet Bruno turns himself in to the police, seeks forgiveness from Sonia, and finally takes an interest in his son. He does this because of those moments of friendship and love he has experienced, and so feels their absence acutely. His sense of morality, then, derives from the interaction with the young Steve (especially after hiding in the freezing water together, saving him from drowning, and trying to warm his legs afterwards) where he realizes his ability to look after another person, and the disgust Sonia shows towards him. The conclusion to L'Enfant, as with their other films, roots morality in society and through engagement with others, rather than any innate human (and thus Christian-based) goodness. It is this understanding of human beings that must be derived from the Dardennes' body of work.

Art and Accessories The Dardennes succeed in creating characters that are so tangibly real by leaning very much on the small details as well drawing on fact and fiction around them. Luc's diary entries in Au dos de nos images reveal that the arts, as much as concrete facts, impinge on their creative process of filmmaking. The killing of the toddler, Jamie Bulger, by two young boys in Liverpool in 1993, for example, affected their conception of Le Fils, as did news of parents selling their child in Belgium shortly before making UEnfant. But at the same time, the brothers are always reading fiction or philosophy and seeing films. Shakespeare, Sartre, and Michaux are quoted and reflected on, Arendt and Levinas are particularly influential, as was Toni Morrison for understanding Assita in La Promesse, and Faulkner for entering into the character of Bruno in

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L'Enfant. Rpsetta is described as Madame Bovary's "great grandchild." This character development via real events and other works of art may also be a way of avoiding what they frequently worry about: being too abstract, psychologizing too much rather than completely and genuinely immersing themselves in their characters. This concern also explains why they introduce accessories and habits to define a person—Rosetta's fishing utensils, her Wellington boots, Olivier*s belt, his sit-ups, Igor's tippexed teeth, his ring and half-finished tattoo, Bruno's hat. It is this that the brothers want us to notice because the detail makes each character human—less abstract, more familiar, and inviting our empathy. But the detail flirts with becoming iconic—thus Bruno's hat is sold off early on in UEnfant, in case it takes over the image, in case we start seeing it rather than Bruno's own journey. It is a worry that contrasts with what cinema at other times aspired to be, what a young Jean-Luc Godard, for example, created with the fast-talking, chain-smoking Jean-Paul Belmondo at the start of the New Wave. For some the simplicity that characterizes the Dardennes' films might seem too easy. Rather than agonize over what Sonia should say to Bruno, she faints. There is a similar act in a difficult scene from Le Fils. And even when Sonia's confrontation with Bruno does come, her words are few—"Get out! . . . outside!" But there is nothing easy about this. The ability to keep silent, to hold your tongue, is a restraint that differentiates the Dardennes from other directors who appear to fear silence, anxiously filling their frames with unnecessary sound and color. When Sonia and Bruno meet again, the scene is nearly without dialog and there is no music, only their movements. But everything is so heavily charged that you watch with increasing concern (you have time to feel this), wondering what she will do. She makes soup in the tiny kitchen, there is barely space for Bruno and even less the camera. We feel the claustrophobia and every detail and action has a magnified impact—the pans slammed down on the cooker, the gas flame hissing—we really are in that room. And finally Sonia snaps, screams those two words, and her expression is savage, total disgust and anger. It lasts a second but imprints itself on our memory. The humanism is here, in the refusal to bow to our own expectation for melodrama. Will Sonia take him back, you ask yourself, willing her not to. And then you watch this scene and realize of course not, of course she won't because we are dealing with human beings and the gravity of Bruno's action is fully recognized.


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Cinema's Promise As people, the brothers are lighthearted and calm. The denouement of each of their features certainly belies an optimism at heart, the secret hopes they hold for what cinema, and, by the same token, what man can achieve. But it's an optimism they must work hard to find. In Au dos de nos images we discover that early versions of Le Fils originally had Olivier die, and the first scenarios of Rosetta and UEnfant killed off its leads. "It's as though we have to start with their deaths before we can affirm their lives," Jean-Pierre has commented elsewhere, and this very act of tracing back from a murder, or from bleakness to hope and renewal, is how they have defined one aspect of the human condition: we choose not to kill. Each time their films end with promise, but because they don't superimpose this hope on screen, "let[ting instead] the very texture of the film itself find the miracle that will save [our characters], the gesture, the look, the words that will initiate a new [beginning for them]," then their films always have a harrowing edge. We see the possibility "of starting anew" but we have no illusions about the fact that this can be achieved only through struggle. Films can be companions along the way, though for some cinema only comes after a murder to tell the sorry tale, it can only account for tragedy, not prevent it. Why then, Luc asks in one diary entry, do we still insist on making films, knowing they're redundant, that "a work of art will never stop the arm of the assassin?" Maybe, he concludes, because we're not really sure that they are redundant. The Dardennes harbor this grand hope for the power of cinema, but they don't found their films on it. As artists they content themselves with a single story, event or relationship, but, by consequence of their precision and understanding, they do offer us the promise of the world.

LIFE ON EARTH: THE FILMS OF JEAN-PIERRE AND LUC D ARDENNE (ARTFORUM INTERNATIONAL,

1

APRIL

2006)

ROBIN WOOD

The arrival of VEnfant (The Child), the fourth in a series of closely related feature films from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, offers a welcome opportunity to consider—and indeed celebrate—the Belgian brothers' achievements to date. Their films are intimately interconnected, both stylistically and thematically, to the extent that there have been hostile murmurings that the Dardennes have not made four films but the same film four times. This is totally unjust: In certain respects, it is true, the films are variations on a set of themes; but the cumulative effect is that each becomes the richer for this, even the most superficial crossreferencing only serving to bring out their diversity. The source, no doubt, of many similarities among their films, the Dardennes* production setup is in certain respects unique. Before their international breakthrough in 1996 with La Promesse (The Promise), they had made a number of documentaries and two fiction films (none of which is currently available). They formed their own company, Les Films du Fleuve, in 1994, and they have collaborated on every aspect of filmmaking ever since—the casting, the scripts, the rehearsals, the direction. They work with a resident cinematographer (Alain Marcoen) and editor (MarieHelene Dozo), and sometimes with the same actors. Olivier Gourmet has appeared in all four films: He played the lead in Le Fils (The Son, 2002), a part conceived specially for him; had a major role in La Promesse; and took on supporting roles in Rosetta (1999) and UEnfant. Jeremie Renier is the boy of La Promesse and the young man of UEnfant, made nine years apart. The close relationship of actor to character is underlined occasionally by giving the character the actor's name. The Dardennes cast strictly for suitability, irrespective of the degree of professional experience. Their long-standing collaboration testifies to an exceptional degree of fraternal


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trust and harmony: It is especially difficult to picture any two people directing the same sequence without serious tensions developing. They make their films where they live, in Lfege, often shooting in neighborhoods with which they are familiar. So far they have shown no interest in going beyond their own environment, though this scarcely seems a limitation: The themes and action of the films and the problems faced by their characters are common to any Western country and indeed to any society structured on class. The Dardennes' early documentaries are not, as I said, available for viewing, but it would be surprising were there any extreme discontinuity between them and the fiction films, in which the feeling of documentary is pervasive—another aspect of the deep grammar generating the similarities perceived among the brothers' works. Shooting exclusively on location, using real buildings rather than studio sets (the carpentry school in Le Fils, for example), the Dardennes are consistently true to their roots. Somewhere in the background, perhaps, is the Italian neorealist movement of the 1940s and '50s, which was likewise characterized by location shooting, attention to immediate social problems, frequent recourse to nonprofessional actors, and a sense of passionate engagement with contemporary living. More intriguing to me are the connections between the Dardennes' films and those of Robert Bresson, who also preferred authentic settings to studio sets, but whose obsession with meticulously precise framing would have forbidden him to use a handheld camera to follow his characters around, a technique increasingly common in the Dardennes* work after La Promesse. The connections I have in mind are thematic and very far from a matter of simple imitation. Consider, for example, Bresson's Mouchette (1967) and the Dardennes' Rosetta, both the films and the characters whose names they take. Mouchette and Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne) themselves have a lot in common: Both are teenagers, with no obvious attractions, generally unloved and unwanted, with nowhere left to go and little hope for the future. Mouchette ends her life by rolling almost casually down a riverbank into the water; Rosetta, desperately needing a job, almost allows Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione) to drown in order to get his. Mouchette's shockingly offhand suicide is echoed in Rosetta's hysterical attempted suicide with a gas canister (she is saved by the man she nearly left to drown). There is a closer parallel between Bresson's Pickpocket (1959) and UEnfant: Both films end with prison scenes in which the male protagonists, who have redeemed themselves by confessing their crimes, are visited by the young women who love them. All four Dardenne films, like many of Bresson's, are centered on spiritual journeys culminating in

26

Life on Earth

redemption, with confession as the crucial moment in all but Rosetta: In La Promesse, Igor (Jeremie Renier) finally tells Assita (Assita Ouedraogo) the truth about her husband's death; Olivier (Olivier Gourmet) in Le Fils reveals to his apprentice Francis (Morgan Marinne) that he is the father of the boy Francis killed; Bruno (Renier) confesses to the police to save his young accomplice in L'Enfant. But between the Dardennes and Bresson there is a great gulf. With Bresson, the notion of redemption invariably carries religious overtones entirely lacking in the Dardennes' films (though the central character of Le Fils is a carpenter, there is nothing particularly Christ-like about him): What is at stake for Bresson is the character's immortal soul, and nothing else really matters. The Dardennes are earthier and more practical. With their films, the confession opens the gates to a new possibility of life on earth and, crucially, restored or improved relationships. The thematic similarities between the filmmakers have the effect of foregrounding these far more radical differences. The four Dardenne films themselves are interconnected on many levels. All concern lower- or lower-middle-class characters, most of them losers—three (in La Promesse, Le Fils, and L'Enfant) actually criminals, while the fourth (Rosetta herself) performs one of the meanest acts in the whole of cinema (snitching on the only person who cares for her because she wants his job at the waffle, and all are treated sympathetically. Igor is introduced stealing money from a rich old lady in La Promesse; in Le Fils Francis is a murderer; and L'Enfant*s Bruno is a petty crook who sells his own baby. An important aspect of these films is that they succeed triumphantly in making us care about such deeply flawed characters: No one is contemptible, to the Dardennes; all are human, and all humans are fallible. On the other hand, the filmmakers never indulge or sentimentalize their protagonists. The films carry them to the point where they must confront what they have done and face the consequences. The films are never allowed to culminate in facile "happy endings," only tentative and uncertain new beginnings. While the characters may have begun to confront themselves and their lives, we are given no guarantees, the endings leaving us with the open question, What happens next? When Igor, torn between allegiance to his father and the solemn promise made to Assita's dying husband to look after her and their baby, at last tells her the truth about the death, she shows no gratitude or even an acknowledgment of all he has done, but simply turns and walks away. After a moment he follows her, and we see them walking side by side, but in silence. When Riquet interrupts Rosetta's attempted suicide he is trying to harass, not save her, as renewed punishment for losing him his job; it is only when he grasps what she is trying to do that the sound of the


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offscreen motorbike stops and he comes to her support. End of film: Rosetta's situation is as desperate as ever, and we are given no promise as to the future of the relationship. When Olivier finally tells Francis he knows he killed his son, chases him out into the woods, and pulls him down, his first impulse is to strangle him. That Francis will indeed become a surrogate son is far from guaranteed. Bruno* s breakdown in the prison visiting room, answered by the tears of Sonia (Deborah Francois) and their embrace, suggests that he has undergone a more thorough transformation than Francis or Rosetta. He, as much "the child" of the film's title as the actual baby, has at last grown up and begun to recognize his responsibilities, and he will have Sonia's support. Yet he may still be facing extravagant financial demands from the criminal ring of baby farmers he has been involved with, he has no job to go to, and he will now have a prison record—not exactly "happily ever after," The Dardennes are the most democratic of filmmakers. They always treat the spectator with respect, as their equal. To a highly unusual degree we are given our freedom to read and respond to the images. We are never told how to relate to the characters, how to judge their actions, by any of the means Hollywood and most European cinema (even neorealism!) have conditioned us to. There is no non-diegetic "background" music to give us the "correct" mood, no "dramatic" camera angles or lighting. We are left to judge the characters purely by their actions and their words or by the expressions on their faces, and we are free to make up pur own minds about them. The films construct their imaginary spectator.as at once intelligent, perceptive, and at least provisionally sympathetic. In the case of L'Enfant, however, we are likely to be prejudiced against Bruno before we even see him. The film opens with Sonia, just out of hospital, clutching her baby in her arms (no pram, no carry-cot, not even a basket), going to what is supposed to be their apartment and finding it sublet to strangers. When she eventually finds Bruno he is systematically trying the door handles on a row of parked cars. When they meet he is too preoccupied with the possibilities of criminal action involving an unseen accomplice across the street to pay much attention to the child he has fathered beyond asking its name ("Jimmy, like we said"). Near his hideout on the riverbank, Sonia points out that it was her apartment he sublet and that he has bought his smart new jacket with her money; She then pointedly answers the questions he hasn't thought to ask ('The baby was born at 1:00 a.m. It didn't hurt too much"). Why do we not find him contemptible? Partly because he is both beautiful and charming, and his apparently total confidence attests to a kind of innocence to which his criminal activities and thoughtlessness

28

Life on Earth

seem curiously irrelevant, but more because Sonia is so obviously under the spell of his attractions. She seems totally nonjudgmental about his criminality and, although she fully understands how shamelessly he mistreats her, she accepts it with no more than perfunctory protest, which he easily converts into play. We register him as amoral rather than immoral. Having a baby is something he can take or leave, without much thought either way. He robs people in order to have money to spend or give away; when it runs out, he can rob someone else. He isn't greedy, and it's all rather fun. When Sonia admires the jacket he bought with her money, he promptly buys her a matching one with his own (though stolen), then buys her a pram. He even develops slight qualms about selling his child to a criminal adoption service ("The people he's going to, are they OK? They have money?"). The Dardennes are wonderfully perceptive about the workings of the human mind. In the great majority of movies, we are offered reasonably clear information as to what exactly a character is thinking; the Dardennes understand that one seldom thinks anything exactly. Our thoughts, our perceptions, are typically more complicated, even contradictory. In Le Fils, what "exactly" is Olivier thinking when he decides to take on Francis, and what "exactly" are his various reactions to him throughout the film? Does he really want to kill him, in revenge for the death of his own child? If so, is there a clear point at which he changes his mind? Does he begin to see him as a possible replacement for his son? We are never sure, because he isn't—the contradictions, the conflicting responses, are there from the beginning and have not been definitively resolved by the end. Similarly with Bruno. The idea of selling the baby is not his: It is put into his head by the young woman who supplies him with a new mobile phone. He shows no immediate response beyond automatically dismissing the idea, but a seed is planted and in time it germinates; we feel that it would never have occurred to him spontaneously. His subsequent decision to act on it strikes us as almost literally mindless—no more than a temporary removal of an inconvenience, with no possible repercussions, Bruno goes through the necessary movements almost like a sleepwalker— almost, but not quite: We watch doubts and troubles forming, with the complicated, furtive business of the disposal, for which he is obviously quite unprepared. When he confronts Sonia with what he has done, he is clearly disturbed, though still not prepared to see her, in perhaps the film's most shocking moment, fall unconscious at his feet. His charming and terrible innocence has made it impossible for him to empathize with the experience of a young woman's first motherhood.


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Dialogue throughout the scenes of the transaction is minimal and purely functional, and this discipline continues throughout the answering segment of Bruno's desperate attempts to recover the baby. Everything depends on the Dardennes' disciplined, precise, and objective mise-enscene, with its sustained balance between engagement and detachment, and of course on Renier's performance (equaling that years earlier in La Promesse), which should boost him to the forefront of contemporary French-language cinema. But is there a less-than-excellent performance by anyone in a Dardenne brothers movie? Bruno, hitherto seemingly quite unaware of any possible consequences to any of his actions, suddenly finds himself confronted with a real criminal organization altogether different from the petty thieving of his own little gang of two schoolkids, whom he treated like younger siblings. The moment toward which (we can see in retrospect) the whole film moves—Bruno's breakdown in the final scene—is surely among the great happy endings of cinema because it is so fully earned. Yet it brings us back again to the Dardennes' awareness of the complexity of human emotions. What exactly, we must ask, is Bruno weeping for? For behind that moment of release lies a whole complex of events and experiences. Most obviously, there is the immediate presence of Sonia, visiting him in prison apparently unexpectedly: He is weeping both for what he has done to her and for her potential forgiveness (until he began to cry, she had remained quite detached and inexpressive). Yet we have no guarantee that the forgiveness will extend beyond their brief reunion, that it promises a full reconciliation. There is also (negatively) Bruno's knowledge that, because of him, his young accomplice almost drowned in freezing water, and (positively) the fact of his confession, his acceptance of responsibility, which saved the boy from prosecution and perhaps from a criminal future. Behind the tears, also, is his newfound cognizance of organized crime in all its ugliness and brutality, of the diminished life into which his trivial criminal activities would likely have led him. And, finally, preventing any sense that everything has been resolved, the ultimate scene withholds crucial information. To what, precisely, has Bruno confessed? We hear him admit only to the robbery, to exonerate his accomplice; we never hear him confess to the selling of the baby. Consequently, we also don't know what awaits him outside prison. Are the criminals, who claim he owes them large sums of money still there ready to pounce? Are his tears not only tears of repentance and release but also tears for a very troubling and uncertain future? In any case, for better or for worse, Bruno will leave prison a different person: He has lost forever that irresponsible innocence which was at once his charm and his crippling limitation.

LOWER DEPTHS, HIGHER PLANES: ON THE DARDENNES' LA PROMESSE, ROSETTA, THE SON, AND L'ENFANT (2007)

BERT CARDULLO

In the wake of Titanic, a cinematic lifeboat managed to float my way from Europe: La Promesse (1996), by the Belgians Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. This film is about cultural clash and the moral enlightenment as well as emotional awakening that, under the right circumstances, can come of it. Ironically, the "right circumstances" are those of war and captivity—not literal phenomena in this case but figurative. This is not exactly a new subject—the attempt to reveal a human bond between characters who are otherwise military enemies, political opponents, religious rivals, or racial opposites—but it need not be one in the hands of sensitive writer-directors like the Dardennes, interested in something other than sentimentality, hyperbole, and oversimplification. Measured though moving, La Promesse has a national origin that certainly hasn't helped its distribution prospects. What hasn't helped this film, either, is its title—The Promise, in English—which was the title as well of the German director Margarethe von Trotta's emotionally empty, politically clumsy, and melodramatically labored 1995 romance about the profound impact the Berlin Wall had on all of its German captives, East and West alike. La Promesse premiered in the United States at the 1996 New York Film Festival and was made by two brothers, then in their forties, who had spent most of their twenty-year filmmaking career collaborating on documentaries for European television. They had made two previous fiction features, unreleased in the United States; with this third one, they joined the front rank of contemporary directors working in the tradition of social realism, from Ken Loach and Mike Leigh in England to Francesco Rosi and Gianni Amelio in Italy to Viacheslav Krishtofovich and Vitaly Kanevski in Russia. La Promesse takes place in Seraing, a suburb of the heavily industrialized city of Liege, Belgium, near Antwerp. Seraing, where the


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Dardenne brothers themselves were born, is populated largely by Lfege's work force, or former work force, since unemployment is high here as in other industrial cities of Europe. It is all the more high because, among the people who continue to work, there are illegal aliens from almost everywhere in the world, either smuggled into Belgium without the necessary papers or, if they once had legal documentation, these immigrants have overstayed their permits. Thus they are easy prey for native Belgians who employ such laborers at the same time that they ruthlessly exploit them. And Roger is one of those natives, a jowly, thickly bespectacled working-class man with thinning hair who owns and runs an old building in Seraing split up into small, dingy apartments, where immigrants live at high rents and work at odd jobs (construction, sanitation, spying on their peers) for their no-nonsense landlord as well as for anyone else who will hire them. Soon these poor people discover that, in addition to their rent, their groceries and (makeshift) gas heating are deducted—at equally exorbitant prices—from the already low salaries Roger pays them. They are his financial prisoners, in other words, with nowhere else to go and no one else to turn to. La Promesse is not primarily a socioeconomic report, however, as I presume some of the Dardenne brothers' documentaries were. Yes, the film casts a critical, journalistic eye on the European underclass's escalating hostility toward immigrants, especially Africans, in what has become a Darwinian struggle for survival between both groups. But this picture's aim is less to expose racist xenophobia in Belgium than to create a moral drama out of that xenophobia's social and economic causes. In order to do so, the directors—authors of their own script—introduce someone who is doubtless his parent's child, yet who is less hardened by experience and therefore more reachable,. This would be Igor, Roger's fifteen-year-old son: a blond, skinny, slightly long-haired, and apparently impassive protagonist. Igor is an apprentice mechanic who works at a gas statioji for a man other than his father, but this is a job he quickly loses because of his obligation to assist Roger in various schemes, which include transporting immigrants into and out of Belgium (to other European countries, where there is also a market for their cheap labor) as well as passport-forging . Assist Igor does, without a trace of ethical qualm, for his father is the source of his behavioral code and this man is a business-like hustler, not an irresolutely evil or even consciously criminal taskmaster. Roger takes his work seriously, so seriously as to use force if need be, and he's matterof-fact about what he does for a living—a matter-of-factness that has filtered down to his son, who unhesitatingly accepts his father's amoral

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On the Dardennes' La Promesse, Rosetta, The Son, and L'Enfant

attitude as the way of the world. The very first scene of La Promesse makes clear Igor's unquestioning acceptance of his heritage. The film begins with the thrum of machinery under the credits, a thrumming that we will continue to hear sporadically in place of a musical soundtrack. (The only music in La Promesse comes from a pop band during a bar scene.) There is no sweet music in Roger and Igor's life, the Dardennes imply, only harsh noise and frenzied activity. And that activity is mirrored by Alain Marcoen and Benoit Dervaux's camera, which is frequently up close, sometimes handheld, and seemingly always in pursuit of the quickly moving Igor or the hurriedly driving Roger, with little time for establishing shots or panoramas of the colorless (yet cinematographically colored) cityscape. The camera abruptly finds Igor pumping gas at the garage where he works, just as an old woman drives up with a malfunctioning fan belt. He fixes it, then gets into her car to start the engine as she gets out to look at his handiwork. Igor instantly sees the woman's wallet on the seat next to him and snatches it. After she offers him a tip for helping her—money that he politely refuses—the old lady notices that her wallet is missing and is particularly upset because she has just cashed her pension check. Igor solicitously advises her to go back at once to the parking lot where her car had been sitting and to look around, for she may have dropped her wallet, he says, and thieves are everywhere these days. The teenager subsequently goes through the garage to a backyard where he removes the wad of bills and buries the wallet. Without reflection or demurral, Igor now goes back to his job, where his boss intends to teach him something about soldering. Thus we have been given a brief but graphic sketch of the predatory Igor's composed mind and bearing, an overture to the "musical" drama that follows, during which he will begin to perform as a soloist apart from the influence and authority of his father. The person responsible for Igor's moral edification and emotional rousing is a young African woman Assita, who arrives in Liege from Burkina Faso with her infant son. She has been smuggled there at a price to join her forty-two-year-old husband, Hamidou, who is already a resident in Roger's flophouse. Immediately Igor is fascinated by the tall, dignified, and self-assured Assita's "difference"; by something as minor as the extreme whiteness of her teeth (which, in fun for him but in metaphor for us, he tries to replicate by applying white-out to his own teeth); and by something as major as Assita's observance of West African ritual, in her undressing, for example (which the curious, not prurient, young Belgian observes through the keyhole to her apartment door), and in her prescribed bathing of her child


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so as to protect him from evil spirits—also observed by the godless Igor, who comments with unintended irony that "there are no evil spirits here." A short time after this woman's arrival, her husband is working from a scaffold on the building next door when government inspectors unexpectedly appear at the site. Roger sends Igor to warn Hamidou and the other immigrant laborers to hide, either because they have no papers or their residency permits are no longer valid. But in his hurry the African tumbles from the scaffold and is seriously injured. He thinks he's dying when Igor comes to his side, and for this reason Hamidou elicits a promise from the boy—the promise of the film's title—to look after Assita and his son. Igor drags the body out of sight, tries to halt the man's bleeding, then begs his father to take Hamidou to a hospital; but Roger refuses because of the legal trouble that would follow and imperil his business, which he has somehow managed to protect from scrutiny this time. He takes away the tourniquet that his son had been applying, then forces the stunned boy to help him hide the African under some canvas and later to bury the corpse in cement. Roger argues to Igor that Hamidou's death was an accident and not their fault, but the teenager knows that the African need not have died; in effect, Roger killed him rather than face an official investigation of his illegal activities. From this point on in the picture, the conscience-stricken youth vacillates between loyalty to his father, who lovingly supports his son but is sometimes physically brutal toward him, and loyalty to his oath to Hamidou, whom he barely knew but whose grave, unruffled wife continues (unbeknownst to her) to exercise a hold over Igor. For a while, the boy tries to salve his conscience by doing favors for Assita while keeping the truth from her about her husband: helping the woman to build a pen in an alley to hold a sheep that she will sacrifice to celebrate the end of Ramadan; replacing her gas heater with a more efficient, wood-burning one, which was supposed to go to Roger's girlfriend, Marie; returning a radio stolen from the African family's apartment by drug addicts; paying the majority of a 1,350-franc emergency-room bill for the treatment of Assita's feverish infant; and, above all, by paying off every bit of Hamidou's 10,000-francgambling debt, which debt is the reason that her husband fled, Roger lies to Assita. In an attempt to get on her good side, Igor's father, for his part, goes so far as to arrange Assita's attempted rape, then break in just in time to save her. And in an attempt to get on his wavering son's good side, Roger arranges for him to lose his virginity with one of Marie's slatternly friends . Later Roger fakes a telegram to the African woman from Hamidou, instructing her to join him in Cologne, whereas what the Belgian really intends to do is sell Assita into prostitution there as a way of making sure

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On the Dardennes' La Promesse, Rosetta, The Son, and UEnfant

that she will never discover the real reason for her husband's disappearance. Igor comes to Assita's aid again, however, telling her the truth about the telegram—but not yet about her husband—and fleeing with this grateful but puzzled woman in his father's van. With Igor present, Assita then consults an African spiritualist about Hamidou's whereabouts, but he mistakenly sees no evidence of her husband's death in his collection of jujus and simultaneously advises his client to leave Belgium. (At least Assita's earlier splitting open of a live chicken to read its entrails had yielded the correct information that Hamidou was nearby and that she should therefore persist in her attempts to locate him.) So Assita decides to go by train to Carrara, Italy, where she in any case has a relative, and to wait there for news of Hamidou, which Igor has promised to provide in addition to providing his African friend with forged papers for her trip together with a bundle of francs and lire (obtained by pawning a cherished ring that Roger had given him). Igor's other promise, made to the dying Hamidou, keeps nagging at him, however, for he knows that he will not be able to take care of the African's wife and child once they are in Italy, and he is equally well aware that he's not serving Assita's interests by continuing to hide Hamidou's fate from her. When Roger finally finds this odd couple hiding out in a back room at the garage where Igor used to work, the son is forced to make a choice between the father who has encouraged him to lie and steal and the woman through whose clarity of vision he has first glimpsed virtue, as well as through whose genuine devotion to family he has first understood selflessness. Paradoxically, Igor chooses to be disloyal to his family because Roger feels no loyalty toward anyone outside his immediate circle of two: himself and his son. To disable as well as punish his screaming, importunate father, the teenager uses a mechanical device that chains him upside down without his glasses from the ceiling of the garage, in a stark visual symbol of the blindness, wrongheadedness, and constriction of Roger's moral code. Then Igor, Assita, and her baby escape by foot, crossing a bridge on their way to the train station from which two bigots had earlier urinated down upon the distraught black mother with a sick infant strapped to her back. Figuratively speaking, Igor cannot do the same to Assita, so he blurts out the truth about Hamidou—how and why he died, where he's buried—as they are walking up a stairway in the railway terminal. The African woman has her back to the Belgian adolescent as he speaks, she never turns around to look at him, and she doesn't say a word. Fatherless child in tow, Assita just keeps on walking away down a long corridor, with Igor following but with the camera stationary, in a long take of a long shot: one


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of very few, if not the only one, in La Promesse, and therefore all the more effective in conveying its meaning that Roger and Igor's intense hustle has at last come to a halt. As the closing credits come up, we hear only the buzz of the trainstation lobby until the screen goes to final black, in an unmusical coda designed to make us ponder what Assita and Igor will now do. We cannot know their futures, of course, for the moral choice this young man has made won't yield an orderly conclusion, a tidy solution. Such neat but disingenuous closure could come only from the unexamined actions of an amoral being, which Igor no longer is. His disunion from his father and catalysis by Assita will go on reverberating, within as well as without his immediate circle, setting off a complicated chain reaction that would consist, in the Dardennes' ideal formula, of equal parts faith, hope, and charity. Yes, faith, too, for Assita's reliance on magic and ritual, rather than seeming barbaric, makes her appear to Igor to be in touch with infinitely larger matters than the mere petty grubbing of himself and his father, makes her seem to believe in something besides the frantic aggrandizement of oneself. Which is as good a thumbnail definition of true religion or spirituality that I know: a shift in focus, in concern* from self to other, from man to God and thus to other men, outstanding among them the wretched of the earth. Why, suddenly, is Igor willing and able to make this shift and thereby keep his promise to Hamidou? There are several reasons: first, the shock of the African's violent death followed by Roger's shockingly businesslike attitude toward covering it up; second, Igor's youth and relative inexperience, which, in this coming-of-age story, render the teenager susceptible to the outside influence of someone like Assita; and third, Assita herself, who touches this man-child through her startling sense of self-worth in a money-grubbing world that denies the value of people like her, that puts the overwhelming emphasis bn things-for-themselves rather than on fellow-feeling. One of those things in La Promesse is Igor's motorized go-cart, his prize possession, which we see him joyously racing around Seraing in the precious little free time that his father grants. The boy does have a few acquaintances, but he never allows them to drive the go-cart without his being close by—if at all. Hence one of the signs of this young Belgian's ethical metamorphosis, which not by chance occurs right after he pawns his ring, is his nonchalantly handing over the go-cart's key to a surprised friend with the words, "Use it by yourself, any time you want." Lest the reader conclude that La Promesse is thus a critique, through Igor's benign contact with the Third World, of Western acquisitiveness,

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bear in mind that Hamidou himself was an obsessive gambler prior to his death—a habit surely learned long before he arrived in Belgium—whose fiscal irresponsibility imperiled his family's very survival; that his fellow gamblers were also illegal immigrants—Eastern Europeans, Asians, other Africans—unwilling to forgive his large debt; and that the witch doctor consulted by Assita charges a fee because he is running a business, not a charity—albeit a business that, in this' instance at least, provides a questionable service. The portrayal of these "guest workers," as Western Europeans euphemistically like to call them, is untainted by sorrowful sentimentality, then: they are tough and wily, knowing yet angry, in the face of Roger's outrageous exploitation of them and their families. Moreover, some of them will go so far as to sell their bodies in order to get ahead. Not Assita, it's true, but she nonetheless .remains unsentimentalized herself: she carries a knife, which she pulls on Igor when he reveals that Hamidou does not await her in Cologne, and she stones the Belgian teenager at one point to keep him away from her ailing child, whom she erroneously believes the White Man has infected. Igor grows fond of Assita despite her reserved air, her suspicion of his motives, and even her hostility toward him, but that fondness never grows into an interracial romance that would mawkishly obscure the complexity of the film 's theme and of their own lives. Nor is Roger's relationship with Marie allowed to become anything more or less than what it is for this man of material appetite: a sexual affair of frank necessity, simple convenience, and easy pleasure. There is the suggestion in La Promesse, furthermore, that, like those whom he uses, Igor's father himself is the witting pawn of a bigger crook, a mysterious "Mr. Muller," whom we see briefly only once, but to whom Roger apparently answers during the four or five trips he dutifully makes to this man's hideaway in the course of the movie. The veteran Olivier Gourmet plays Roger more like a gourmand, devouring the role in its entirety rather than picking out the best bits for his and everyone else's delectation. That is, he has created a complete character whose believability hinges on the dispatch with which he conducts himself—a dispatch that implies previous deliberation and resolution, and that does not allow for selected, present-tense moments of soul-searching, on the one hand, and self-display or -dramatization, on the other. In his first role Jeremie Renier, as Igor, is Gourmet's son to the extent that he behaves with a similar heedless dispatch until his transformation, whose three parts—inciting contact with Assita, the turning point of Hamidou's death, and Igor's gradual fulfillment of his promise with all its ramifications—Renier handles with an empathic


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conviction and organic restraint that bespeak sensitive direction on the Dardennes' part and uncanny discernment on his own. At the end, for example, after he has told Assita the truth about Hamidou, Igor shows little emotion because Renier knows his character has been touched too profoundly for superficial emotion, more profoundly than this teenager would ever have suspected was possible for him. The one display of surface emotion that Renier does permit Igor to have, tears and an embrace of a flummoxed Assita in the garage space where he hides her, is a frustrated response to his inability to tell her the truth about her husband. Igor's catalyst is played by Assita Ouddraogo, a schoolteacher in Burkina Faso who, though not related to thefilmmakerIdrissa Ou6draogo, has appeared in several of this masterful West African's motion pictures (like the man who plays her husband in La Promesse, Rasman£ Ou&Iraogo, who is Idrissa's cousin and whom viewers may remember from his role as Noaga, the village drunk, in Yaaba [1987]). About Idrissa Ou&iraogo's use of non-professional actors like Assita in TilaX (1990), as in his other films, I once wrote that the obvious advantage of his using local villagers here is that they don't have to learn how to be at home in a new environment: this place is their home and they are therefore completely at ease in it. Another, not so obvious advantage is mat, in afilmthat is less wrenching drama than sacrificial ritual, the actors must give themselves over to the ritual more than they must create character and emotion, must be subsumed by the tale more than they must dominate it, must act naturally more than they must super-naturally act. And this the untrained villagers are supremely qualified to do. They are aided in their work, of course, by the movie camera, which has a way of conferring grandeur on the simplest, most unassuming of human lives. Something similar can be said of Assita Ouddraogo's performance in La Promesse, except that in this picture she doesn't learn how to be completely at home or at ease in her new, Belgian environment, and that's the point: simply endowing the film with her beautiful presence, she cares for her son and is devoted to her husband as if they were still living in Burkina Faso, where the ritualistic order of things continues to include self-sacrifice as well as sacrifice of the animal variety. The mix of professionals and non-professionals alike in La Promesse works, as the ingenuousness of one group gets played off against the ingenuity of the other. This inclusion of non-professionals is possible, of course, because in the cinema the acting of words is not so much the thing; more so than acting onstage, acting on film is part of a larger picture that depends for effect on its cinematographic rendering—on how it is

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photographed and edited and even scored. And that larger picture always includes the expressiveness of faces, like that of Jeremie Renier, from which, without benefit of spoken language or formal training, the camera can elicit character in a way the stage obviously cannot (hence one of the beauties of silent film). So much so that, when an amateur or a professional actor does speak, that actor's believability is a function as much of his screen image up to that point as of the persuasiveness and understanding with which his lines are spoken. When I see a far-reaching gem like La Promesse—\he product of a more than modest cinema in the case of tiny Belgium—I think of the immodest American cinema and all the money it spends each year on domesticated duds. (I mean artistic duds, which more often than not turn out to be box-office successes!) Our cinema has always functioned in this way; that is why it properly calls itself "the 'industry"; and that is why most of its products are disposable or perishable. This situation isn't going to change, but it's nice to be reminded yet again by Western Europe of the large possibilities—some would say responsibilities—inherent in film art. Particularly of the low-budget, small-scale kind: out of the seemingly meager plot ingredient of a motherless child thrown into contact with an alien soul, the Dardenne brothers have fashioned a unique cinematic work that speaks not only to its own culture of Belgium. This picture also speaks to a world increasingly filled with single-parent families, economic refugees, and political-cum-military prisoners—all of then in search of permanent (re)unification, final redemption, and lasting remembrance. Unlike La Promesse, the Dardennes' next picture, Rosetta won the brothers their first international prize: the Palme d'Or at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival over David Lynch's The Straight Story, I suspect that the American entry lost not only because of the increasingly virulent antiAmericanism of the French, but also because of this picture's unashamedly Christian overtones in an era unparalleled for its greedy secularism. But Rosetta has its Christian overtones as well, though they have been missed by every commentator I have read, probably because of the movie's seemingly unrelieved bleakness of tone. Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne themselves have not helped their cause by comparing Rosetta to the modernist hero of Kafka's The Castle (1926), a land surveyor called "K.," who tries in vain to be recognized by the very officials who supposedly have summoned him to their village (which is overlooked by a castle on a hill). She has more in common, however, with Bresson's protagonists than with Kafka's "K"—in particular with the late, great French filmmaker's Mouchette and Balthazar. Their parables represent a departure from the


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Christian certitude to be found in such earlier works by Bresson as Diary of a Country Priest (1951), A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959), and The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962); still, a principle of redemption or a promise of transfiguration operates in Mouchette (1966) and Au hasard, Balthazar (1966) as well, even if it may be found only in a humanity or an animality redeemed from this earth. Both these pictures are linked with Rosetta in their examination of the casual, gratuitous inhumanity to which the meek of this earth are subjected, a fourteen-year-old girl in the former case and a donkey in the latter. Mouchette is the loveless, abused, humiliated daughter of an alcoholic father and a dying mother, living in a northern France made to seem unreal by the juxtaposition of village life from another century with the modernity of jazz and automobiles. So relentlessly oppressive is Mouchette's young existence that she finally drowns herself—to the accompaniment of Monteverdi's Magnificat, which is Bresson's way of indicating that death alone is victory over such a spiritually wasted life. Balthazar, by contrast, begins his life as a child's pet who.is formally christened, virtually worshipped like a pagan idol, and generously adorned with flowers. But the world of hard labor brutally intrudes: Balthazar is beaten and broken in; becomes a circus attraction; gets worked almost to death grinding corn for an old miser; then is hailed as a saint and walks in a church procession after his rescue, only to be shot to death by a customs officer during a smuggling escapade. The donkey's only saving grace, in a bizarre world of leather-clad motorcyclists and roughhewn millers, is that he is allowed to die on a majestic nqtountainside amid a flock of peacefully grazing sheep. I have summarized Mouchette and Au hasard, Balthazar in some detail because I believe that the Dardenne brothers know both these films as well as the religious tradition, or spiritual style, of which they partake—one dominated by French Catholics even subsequent to Bresson, in such pictures as Cavalier's Thfrbse (1986), Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan (1987), Rohmer's A Tale of Winter (1992), and Doillon's Ponette (1996). Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne happen to be Belgian, not French, and prior to Rosetta they spent twenty years making sociopolitical documentaries for European television before turning to fiction film in the socially realistic La Promesse (1996). That fine and unforgettable work burrowed into a rough chunk of proletarian life in Lfege today, an economically deterministic environment in which the struggle to survive leads, ravenously, to the exploitation of workers by other workers. Into this pit of money-grubbing vipers came an African family that showed a morally degraded, teenaged Belgian boy—simply through their dignity and

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pride—that another kind of existence is possible, even in the muck. We are in the heavily industrialized city of Liege again in Rosetta, and again we are dealing with a Belgian teenager, this time a girl. But in this followup feature film the Dardennes (who write their own screenplays) not only forsake this world of proletarian realism for the nether one of subproletarian naturalism; at the same time, paradoxically, they seem to invoke an otherworldly realm that, unbeknownst to Rosetta (or anyone else in the picture, for that matter), runs parallel to her own. Living in a tiny, beat-up trailer (sans toilet or running water) with her alcoholic, irresponsible, utterly dispirited mother, who mends old clothes for peddling in second-hand shops when she is not turning tricks in exchange for drinks, eighteen-year-old Rosetta is a furiously sullen bundle of energy. This adolescent longs to have a "normal" life—which for her means having a "real" job—and to become a k productive member of society, but even this modest goal appears to be beyond her grasp. (Hence her identity is as a member of the lumpenproletariat, or proles who haven't had mechanized or otherwise rote work long enough to be dehumanized by it.) As we see at the film's outset, Rosetta must be bodily removed from a factory where she's just been fired, for reasons unspecified. Subsisting in existential angst, quietly terrified that she will slide into the abyss like her bedraggled mother, the fresh-faced daughter wages a desperate, purely instinctive battle to lift herself out of her wretched, nearly feral existence and achieve a material state of grace. Like some form of brute life force, the barely socialized Rosetta will do anything but beg to survive; like a jackal (as opposed to Balthazar, a passive pack animal), she will nip at any chance to prolong her life— including poach fish with rudimentary tackle from a pond so dank and muddy that it could be called a swamp. Indeed, this movie makes a spectacle of Rosetta's repeated dodging across a highway and ducking into the woods that adjoin her trailer park: as quick and cunning as an animal, she scrambles for her life, then covers her tracks, hides her things, and hoards her food (sometimes outside, where she'd rather compete with the foxes for it than with her shiftless mother). Ever walking briskly when she is not actually running, Rosetta appears to compensate for the paralyzing, anomic dread of her implacable existence with a defiant, headlong tread. Determined to find regular work after being fired from the factory job—and equally determined not to go on welfare—Rosetta applies for several menial vacancies without success before landing a position at a waffle stand. There she replaces a young woman whose sick baby caused her to miss ten days of work in one month, and there she meets Riquet, a young man from the countryside who ekes out his own pittance at the


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waffle stand while secretly skimming profits from his boss. (This taskmaster runs a number of such stands throughout Lifege, and is played by the voracious Olivier Gourmet, the father in La Promesse.) Delicately performed by Fabrizio Rongione, Riquet is the only person in the film to show Rosetta any kind of sympathy, and the two develop a tentative friendship—though his awkward attempts to gain her romantic interest go completely unacknowledged by the preoccupied girl. During one such poignant try at Riquet* & crude apartment (which appears to be carved out of a warehouse), he treats Rosetta to a dinner of beer and fried bread, stands on his head, then plays a tape of himself amateurishly banging on a set of drums (the only "music" we hear during the movie, since the Dardennes wisely eschew the adornment of a musical soundtrack here as in La Promesse) and tries to teach her to dance. She remains unresponsive, however, especially because of an attack of stomach pain, one of several such (unexplained) attacks that recur throughout the film. But she does ask to sleep at Riquet* s place, just to get away from her mother for a night—which she does, in her own bedroll, untouched by her understanding host. Before falling asleep, Rosetta utters in voice-over (even as we see her on screen) the following mantra of reassurance, words that at the same time painfully attest to the degree of her alienation from a self that she has nearly objectified in an effort to steel her humanity against the world's cruel indifference: "Your name is Rosetta. My name is Rosetta. You've found a job. I've found a job. You have a friend. I have a friend. You have a normal life. I have a normal life. You won't fall into the rut. I won't fall into the rut." To indicate the relative normality that Rosetta has achieved, the Dardennes film most of this scene at Riquet's apartment in a static, becalming long take, with the camera in medium shot. Much of the rest of Rosetta, by contrast, is photographed with a handheld camera that remains disorientingly close to the heroine as she dashes about, with a twofold effect. On the one hand, the restless, uneven camerawork of Alain Marcoen (who was also the director of cinematography for La Promesse) creates the visual equivalent of the instability and uncertainty in Rosetta's life; on the other hand, the handheld camera seems to dog Rosetta with an angry intensity that matches her own, as it were her doppelganger-cumguardian angel or, antithetically, the devil of destiny in disguise. The jagged, hurtling camera immediately resumes its ways in the scene following Rosetta's sleep-over at Riquet's, where she is fired from the waffle stand after being on the job for only three days. (She is replaced by the boss's son despite her efficiency, and despite the fact that this girl has never seemed happier—and therefore more personable—than when she's

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On the Dardennes* La Promesse, Rosetta, The Son, and UEnfant

been serving up waffles.) So desperate is she not to "fall into the rut" which now gapes wide-open before her, that, after she's terminated, the raging teenager pathetically clings to a heavy sack of flower as though it were simultaneously a life raft and the anchor preventing her forcible removal from a life-giving ocean of work. Rosetta possessed no such lifeline when, earlier, she and her estranged mother had become embroiled in a fight along the shore of the turbid, stagnant pond near the trailer camp (ironically named "Grand Canyon," by the way), at the end of which the older woman tossed her daughter into a moat so thick with mud that the youth could barely pull herself out of it. Down into the metaphorical abyss she went—appropriately, at her mother's hands—and down there, in the hellishness of high water, she almost suffocated. Riquet nearly succumbs to the pond as well when, subsequent to Rosetta's dismissal from the waffle stand, he finds her fishing, tries to help, and accidentally falls in. So intent is this girl on not going down with him—literally or figuratively—that she nearly lets her only friend drown. But she relents and saves him at the last minute, only to get Riquet's treasured job through another means: by blowing the whistle on his scam at the waffle stand (which she has long since detected and a share of which he had even offered to her, albeit unsuccessfully), after which the boss instantly installs Rosetta in the stunned boy's place. Again, however, she doesn't remain on the job for long, except that this time the working girl terminates herself: in part because Riquet's physical as well as mental harassment, in the wake of his own dismissal, has awakened her moral conscience; in part because Rosetta is tired of fending for her drunken mother in addition to herself, and for this reason has decided to quit not only work but also life. She plans to kill herself by turning on the propane gas in the house trailer she has made airtight—gas that will dispatch her passed-out mother along with her—but the canister runs out before the job is done. So Rosetta must go to buy another one from the seedy, opportunistic caretaker of the trailer court. As she struggles to carry the extremely heavy new canister back to the trailer-for this young woman, even committing suicide will be hard work—Riquet arrives on his scooter for one more episode of harassment. But he senses that something is terribly wrong when Rosetta drops to the ground in tears; he gets off his motorbike, goes over to the fallen girl, and compassionately lifts her up; they look silently into each other's eyes for a moment, after which the camera switches to a held shot of Rosetta's face in medium close-up; then the film abruptly ends with a quick cut to black.


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That Rosetta has Christian overtones should be evident from this final scene, as well as from the titular character's one outfit of clothing, her recurrent stomach pain, and the food she eats. This pain, like the stomach cancer of Bresson's protagonist in Diary of a Country Priest, is meant to reflect not only the physical stress of Rosetta's impoverished life, but also its spiritual dilemma. That she can get relief from her pain only by turning a blow-dryer on her abdomen ought to tell us that human warmth, or fellow-feeling, is missing from her life as well. And that human warmth comes to this latter-day Everywoman, as a miraculous godsend, in the form of Riquet, who in several scenes pursues her as inexorably with his scooter as the Dardennes do throughout with their camera; and who more than once wrestles with Rosetta as if he were struggling, like a saintly figure from a medieval religious drama, for the possession or salvation of her soul. Rosetta's habitual costume itself underscores her near-medieval existence, foraging for sustenance in the wilds of the postmodern Western European economy. Though her facial mask is expressionless, she dresses in a jumbled garb of red-and-black jacket, thick yellow tights, gray skirt, and rubber boots—in other words, in a kind of fool's motley that vividly stands out against the sparse and somber, cool and wet, winter landscape of Belgium. This is initially no wise fool, however, for all her survivalist cunning; Rosetta gets her (otherworldly wisdom, emotional lift, or spiritual resurrection from none other than the sad-eyed, drably dressed, otherwise corporeal Riquet, who, in a reversal of gender roles, plays the Columbine to her Harlequin (or who, as a former gymnast, represents the accomplished acrobat and dancer in Harlequin to Rosetta's wily if dense servant). And that resurrection, that uplift, comes at the end of Rosetta's own via dolorosa, during which, like Christ carrying his wooden cross, she stumbles three times with her canister of propane gas. She has finally exchanged her material state of grace, however minimal, for grace of another kind, and the implication is that Rosetta had to forego the body before she could bare her soul—a body that we have seen her nourish only with fish (the traditional symbol of Christ), bread, waffles (whose cognate term is the [Eucharistic] wafer), and, near the very end, a revivifying hardboiled egg. Those who have argued that Rosetta's tone is unvaried in its grimness—that this girl is trapped throughout and the Dardenne brothers' film is merely a documentary-like chronicle of her depressing case— choose to ignore this work's spiritual element, in addition to the fact that, unlike Bresson's Mouchette or Balthazar, Rosetta is alive and in good company at the conclusion. Put another way, there is a mite of hope for

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this young heroine, and it comes from another person, from the human spirit of Riquet. That hope does not derive from the redemption of physical reality, from the uniting of Rosetta with natural elements in space as a way of creating for her a supernal warp in time, as it would if Rosetta had been shot in realistic-cum-transcendental style (like The Straight Story, to cite the most recent example). Rosetta*s sphere is circumscribed, as the handheld camerawork (with almost no room for establishing shots, panoramic vistas, or "dead, time" spent dwelling on the phenomenal world that surrounds her) reveals, and the only way to reach her is by force, as Riquet learns. As Rosetta, Emilie Dequenne (Best Actress at Cannes) is so thoroughly immersed in her otherwise unappealing (and most unglamorous) character's simmering fierceness—so free of the self-regard that can tinge even the best actors' work—that, by sheer force of will, she. forces us to pay attention to Rosetta's appalling life in all its squalor. Hence there was an extra-aesthetic pleasure in wondering what Dequenne herself is like and was like between takes during the shooting of Rosetta, so extreme is the role into which she has plunged herself. There was another kind of pleasure, too—one as damning as it is astonishing. That is the pleasure we take in paying rapt attention to, and thinking a lot about, characters and subjects in film (in theatre and fiction as well, but especially in cinema, the most wide-reaching and therefore the most democratic of arts) to which we wouldn't normally give a large amount of consideration in real life. This, of course, is the special, intriguing power that all art holds over us: the power to engage merely by the act of isolating and framing. I bring it up in the context of Rosetta only because it is more pronounced in the naturalistic mode than in any other. And because naturalism, when combined with a spiritual or a transcendental style, has the power to exalt like no other mode: to shift our concern, to elevate our solicitude, from self to other, from man to God and thus to other men. Outstanding among them must be counted the wretched of the earth, the Rosettas of this world who race through their time here because they mortally fear to idle. After Rosetta in the Dardennes' filmography comes The Son (2002), in which the milieu—the workaday life of a carpenter who teaches carpentry to wayward boys in Li&ge—is again the core, but which, like Rosetta, subtly introduces a spiritual element or Christian overtone into its otherwise sordid tale. Put another way, Emile Zola seems to occupy the foreground in these two pictures while Leo Tolstoy glimmers in the distance. Everyday working life may be where most of the world's drama takes place, then, but it is also, the Dardennes gently insist, where God's grace performs most of its work as well.


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Paradoxically, part of the enlarging (almost frightening) effect of The Son in the end comes from the Zolaesque banalities with which it begins. First we hear the whine of a saw. (There is never any music, or musical adornment, on the soundtrack, as there wasn't in either La Promesse or Rosetta.) Then comes the clatter of some hammering and other shop noises as we enter the world of Olivier, a skilled carpenter in his thirties, who is moving around a shop attending to the work of teenaged boys. Most of the movement in this sequence—in almost all of the sequences— is shot up close and in natural light with a handheld camera, which, in the sense of spontaneity or immediacy it thereby creates, seems to the Dardennes, in collaboration with their usual cinematographer, Alain Marcoen, to be an adjunct of naturalism., (It is also an adjunct of the documentary work with which the brothers began their careers, where it is often impossible to set up a stationary camera, create lighting effects, and deploy make-up artists.) Hence, through much of the beginning, we are following Olivier as if we were one of his teenaged charges, not accompanying him like a colleague. We see his face sometimes, but mostly we see the back of his head as the handheld camera weaves us into the pattern of Olivier's life. We get some idea of his skills and standards, of course, but we also get an idea of his good feeling toward these boys, who are the real focus of this opening segment. For they are not simply students of carpentry or carpenters' apprentices, we learn: they have recently been released from juvenile prison and are being taught a useful trade here, in a program sponsored by the Belgian government. We learn more when Olivier's former wife, Magali, visits. She tells him that she is remarrying and asks whether he has met anyone. No, he replies. Apparently, their divorce came about because of an emotional shock: their infant son was murdered, and this couple could not survive the blow—as a couple. Olivier survives singly by immersing himself in his work with the delinquent sons of other couples, work that is demarcated, if you will, by the whining of saws and the tapping of hammers. And thus does The Son progress until a new "son" arrives, sixteen-year-old Francis, who has just completed a five-year prison term. In the course of his daily work with Francis, Olivier asks the youth why he was sent to prison. For stealing a radio from a car, says Francis. But after he began the theft, he saw that there was a baby in the car; and when that baby began to cry, Francis had to silence him. (What, we may ask, was the baby doing alone in the vehicle, and, if one of its parents left it there, was that what precipitated their break-up?) Soon Olivier realizes that this is the boy who killed his son. Yet throughout Francis's account

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of his crime, as through all their work together, this humble—or humbled—carpenter reveals nothing by word or look; not voluble in any case, he does not tell Francis that he is the murdered child's father. Olivier just keeps on working. He isn't sure why he doesn't reveal his identity to the teenager or why, for that matter, he agrees to work with him. But when Olivier is aldne, the unspoken questions tear at him, the ultimate one of which has to be, "How do I forgive the unforgivable?" When his ex-wife discovers that he is working with their child's killer, she faints in his arms. Later she asks her ex-husband and this former father why he is committing such an act, to which Olivier replies with an aching, insistent bewilderment, "I don't know." And so he doesn't. In some notes made by the Dardenne brothers during the shooting of the film (and included in its press material), they wrote in answer to the same question, "We don't know, either." Yet the immensity of forces that are at work in, and on, Olivier—previously unsuspected by this man but soon to be revealed to him—is precisely this movie's subject. So much so that, as the Dardennes agree in their notes, it could have been called The Father as easily as The Son, Knowingly or not, Olivier asks Francis to accompany him one Sunday to a lumberyard that Olivier's brother owns. Other boys at the government center have made this trip, for it gives them a good chance to learn something more about wood and woodworking. In the deserted lumberyard this time, however—as this carpenter and his helper select planks and load them onto a trailer behind a pickup truck—Olivier tells Francis what he knows about the crime against his and Magali's son. Perhaps Olivier planned to tell him, perhaps not; but their isolation here seems to make room for the facts such that they seem to burst forth. Fearing that his teacher will take revenge in this lonely place, Francis panics, scampers over the piles of planks, and breaks out of the yard into the woods. Shouting that everything will be all right, Olivier chases after him, catches the boy, then finally subdues him—in the end with his hands around Francis's throat. Thus he finds himself in the same position that Francis was in with the baby. The shock of this fact stops Olivier—who did not mean to harm the teenager in any case (just as the latter, one could say, had not planned to kill Olivier's son). He releases Francis and gets up, and the youngster, somewhat calmed, follows Olivier back to the lumberyard. There the two of them continue their working life as, once again, they start loading planks onto the trailer. Then, like La Promesse and Rosetta before it, the film stops rather than ends, as if to suggest that there will be no end to the moral drama or quest in which now both Olivier and Francis are willing,


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and witting, participants. They themselves may not be father and son, but some kind of holy spirit at last has come to attend them. Anyone who doubts the divine or spiritual component in The Son ought to consider Olivier's profession of carpentry (together with his age), the film's very title, the Sunday on which Olivier and Francis have their day of reckoning, even their names themselves. (Francis's, of course, recalls the friar and later saint who founded the Franciscan order; in the Charlemagne legends, Olivier was the close friend of Roland, that stalwart defender of the Christians against the Saracens; and the name of Magali, Olivier's ex-wife, is itself derived from Magdalene.) Consider also Olivier's "wrestling match" with Francis in the lumberyard, something akin to which occurs toward the end of Rosetta as well: it is as if this carpenter were struggling here, like a saintly figure from a medieval drama, for possession of his wayward apprentice's soul. No, this starkly sculptured, naturalistically simple narrative does not depend on such a religious overlay for its effect; The Son doesn't even depend on plot twists, of which there are none after Francis's introduction to the story. In so compact a drama on such a huge subject, the fulfillment or embodiment is all, and that takes place chiefly through the revelation of character—which is to say, through the performances. But those performances could not have succeeded, I submit, without the kind of internal conviction on the part of the actors that depends, in this case, on spiritual understanding. The spirit, after all, resides within—in precisely the kind of internal conviction shown by Olivier Gourmet (who was in the first two Dardenne features, as the boy's crafty, exploiting father in La Promesse and the girl's boss in Rosetta) and Morgan Marinne in the roles of Olivier and Francis—not in external trickery or special effects. Take the person of Gourmet (whom the judges at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival had the good sense to choose as Best Actor over feckless Adrian Brody of The Pianist): he couldn't have a less distinguished face— doughy and bespectacled—but his physical force, and the concentration with which he uses it, assure us that a manifold figure is lurking within the seeming non-entity of a provincial carpenter. When he chases Francis around the lumberyard, for example, what we see is the sheer physicality of that chase; what we sense on account of Gourmet's acting, and what is not verbalized, is the largeness of spirit welling up inside him—the kind that seeks not just immediately to reassure the boy, but also eternally to forgive him for the mortal sin of infanticide. How Olivier is able to do this, God only knows. Let me add, about filial longing or love of the kind found in The Son, that here the treatment of this emotion happily avoids the excesses of

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sentimentality, on the one hand, and irony, on the other. Naturally the cinema, like literature, has always taken profound emotion as one of its primary subjects; and being moved, in art as in life, may be the oldest emotion of them all. But great filmmakers like Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, like great writers, make it new every time. They do so with unembarrassed earnestness, a willingness to consider the world seriously and uncorrosively, without any interest in cynicism or nihilism, alienation or revolt, the hip or the cool. All of which, like irony, are really the flip side of sentimentality, that sweet instrument of evasion and shield, whose strong and touching feeling the lesser artist uses to deflect strong and heartless pain. Indeed, if the seven deadly sins were reconsidered for the postmodern age, vanity would be replaced by sentimentality. The most naked of all emotions, relegated to Hallmark cards and embroidered pillows, sentimentality is one of the distinctive elements of kitsch. "The heart surges"—could there be a better description of a person in the throes of sentiment, whose heart expands to absorb its impact? But, as with other sins of excess, the line here between the permissible and the scandalous resists easy definition. As Somerset Maugham put the matter, "Sentimentality is only sentiment that rubs you the wrong way." And Maugham doubtless knew that, with the exception of puppy dogs or little children, love is the most sentimental of subjects, and sentimentality is the pitfall that all great love stories must overcome. The Son may not be a love story in the traditional sense, but it is a love story nonetheless. However, unlike great sentimental characters such as Jay Gatsby and Emma Bovary—who, by novel's end, must somehow be disabused of that emotion, unsentimentalized, often just before death (the reverse of the process undergone by Lily Bart in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, which sustains its emotional impact through its final devastating scene because there is otherwise not a sentimental moment in this relentless novel)—Olivier, for all his filial feeling, seem disabused of sentimentality almost from the start. That's because, as an indigenous member of a lower social order than the titular characters of Fitzgerald and Flaubert, he can't afford it, in both senses of the word. Olivier has no "title" like "Great" or "Sir"; his could only be the generic, anonymous, unadorned one of father, if "father" were part of his film's title in the first place. But it isn't. His son is—is the whole of that title. And thus are we quietly informed that it is to his son, not himself, that he would be devoted—which is sentiment that rubs me the right way. God's grace appears to be at work again in the Dardennes' next picture, UEnfant {The Child, 2005), but everyday working life in this film,


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as opposed to Rosetta and The Son, is a life of petty crime. The place, once more in a Dardenne film, is a Belgian industrial city. Bruno and Sonia, attractive, young, truly mated but not married, are thieves; they live in criminality as fish live in water. She has just given birth to a son (whom she names."Jimmy"), which for the time being relieves her of any moral imperative except maternity—the first shot, in fact, is of this young woman in a tight, handheld close-up, carrying her child up a flight of dingy stairs. But this is not your usual screen baby of the kind to be found in such American movies as Three Men and a Baby (1987), Baby Boom (1987), She's Having a Baby (1988), and Nine Months (1995). Jimmy is almost supernaturally quiet, and, more important, he is rarely seen because of his cocoon-like blanket. Cuteness and sentiment don't play a part in L'Enfant, you see. Grimness and grace do. Even as L'Enfant immediately sets itself apart from what is nearly a Hollywood subgenre, it, like Rosetta, places itself alongside the cinema of Robert Bresson. Except that here the reference is to Pickpocket, not Mouchette. L'Enfant and Pickpocket are each tales of crime, punishment, and redemption, spiritual odysseys through a world that could hardly seem more drably material. And in this pursuit they both partake of the religious tradition, or transcendental style, that has been dominated by French (or French-speaking) Catholics, in such pictures, in addition to Bresson's and the Dardennes', as the aforementioned Thfrbse, Under the Sun of Satan, A Tale of Winter, and Ponette. Back to VEnfant itself: only after the film is finished can we recognize that its first image, of Sonia and the infant—of a new life being carried to its future—is a muted hint of its theme. Back at her apartment, she finds herself locked out and discovers that, while she was giving birth, the father of her child opportunistically sublet their apartment—using the quick cash to outfit himself in a leather porkpie hat and striped windbreaker. When Sonia finally tracks Bruno down, some fifteen minutes into the movie, he is engaged in his own version of multi-tasking: walking down the middle of a street so that he can panhandle from motorists on both sides at the same time as he looks out for a burglary in progress. (Bruno's chief activity at present is to use schoolboys of twelve or so to steal from places where he himself cannot go, pay them off, and then fence the loot.) She shows him the bundle in her arms but he is far prouder of his new duds, and much happier that Sonia is sexually available to him once again. To celebrate—her availability or the baby's birth, it's not clear—Bruno buys Sonia a matching windbreaker and, for Jimmy, an outsized infant carrier. Then it's back to being busy with his "work"—a cell-phone call to one of his accomplices in this instance—and to behaving in every instance like a

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machine: ever in motion, always making connections, constantly doing something that will bring in more money. Is Bruno the devil incarnate, you ask, so much so that he can't even respond to his own newborn child? Not really, for he is not calculating or manipulative, malevolent and destructive, though the face of Jer&nie Renier, as Bruno, could fool you. (Renier was the fifteen-year-old boy in La Promesse, viewers will recall.) Thatch-headed and blond (like Sonia), he has level eyes that are shadowed, cheeks that are hollow, and creases which have set in around the mouth, where his lips tug upward in a chronic grin—thus seeming too old for his twenty-four years yet also somewhat unfinished, as if he, or his squared-off chin and unmodeled nose, were awaiting refinement. But Bruno is not evil, only impulsive and without regard for the repercussions of his actions; indeed, it's as if morality were a concept entirely alien to him, or as if the moral machinery that makes up most human beings is missing a piece in his case and therefore malfunctioning. Visually, that missing piece is intimated by the narrowness of Bruno's perspective. To wit, the camera stays close to him, often sitting on his shoulder and refusing to reveal anything, during what can be unnerving long takes, that he does not experience immediately for himself. Yet such a narrowness of vision is also, paradoxically, an intimacy of vision: a way of clinging to the character of Bruno and thereby making us feel the moral weight of his actions, even when he does not. For it is on him that the camera dwells, as L'Enfanfs central character, not on his obviously more sympathetic companion, Sonia. (Nonetheless, VEnfant is sometimes less tightly framed than the Dardennes' previous feature films, and that is because, though, like them, it concentrates primarily on a single individual, it also features—unlike them—something resembling a romantic relationship between a man and a woman.) So narrow is Bruno's perspective (as opposed to our intimate view of him), so immediate his focus, that, although he now has a child in addition to a steady girlfriend, he feels no need for a fixed abode. Sometimes he himself sleeps in a cardboard box by the river's edge, but now that their apartment has been rented out to someone else, he checks his "family" into a homeless shelter. The next day, while Sonia is standing in line to apply for financial assistance, Bruno goes off with their baby and arranges to sell it for several thousand dollars to a gang that specializes in illegal adoptions. His rationale is that the money will enable him and Sonia to survive, and that she can always have another child later if she wants. Then, when Sonia comes looking for Jimmy, he tells her what he has done—after which the camera cuts to her on the ground, to which she has


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fallen after fainting. (This moment is much like the one in The Son where the carpenter tells his ex-wife that his new apprentice is the fellow who killed their child.) Let me digress for a moment here to describe how the visual style, or emotional rhythm, of VEnfant changes at the turning point of its action, once Bruno decides to give up his young son for a wad of cash. The jumpiness or jitteriness of the camerawork in the earlier scenes gives way here to a steadier pace as the camera follows Bruno to the outskirts of the city (Seraing, which is right next to Lfege, in eastern Belgium), where his rendezvous with the baby traffickers will take place. For the Dardennes want you to experience the lengths to which he will go to commit his crime. And when he gets to the scene of exchange, where he stands alone in real time in a dimly lit apartment, the brothers want you to know what it's like for the normally restless, impatient Bruno to wait, for once in his life. (A "once" that was foreshadowed earlier by a key image from Bruno's world-in-motion: of the protagonist standing alone by the side of some multi-lane highway, poised to dash across but momentarily stymied by the heedless vehicles speeding past.) Half in shadow, Bruno listens anxiously for the unseen buyers to come and go. (It's easy to hear footsteps in a Dardenne film, because there's never a musical score—only ambient sound.) Then, after long, long moments of stillness comes a brief respite as Bruno rushes toward his money. But time will soon stretch itself out again, as the Dardennes next insist on showing Bruno's return to the city center. This patient rhythm has nothing to do with the ironic, distancing longueurs of a Jim Jarmusch or an Aki Kaurismaki, or with the meditative, temporally extended formalism of a Hou Hsiao-hsien. Such a rhythm has everything to do with the character of Bruno: how he experiences the world, and how, despite his thoughtlessness and even insentience, we are made to experience it along with him. Unexpectedly riven by Sonia's suffering in response to the loss of her child, Bruno races to buy back Jimmy, to reverse the irreversible, as it were. Not that this agile if unconvincing liar realizes yet what he has done or why Sonia should stubbornly refuse to forgive him—even after he manages to recover the baby from the adoption gang, repay the money they gave him, and return his son to its mother. Part of Bruno's penance, however—which Sonia does not know—is that he still owes the adoption crooks a lot of money in return for what they would have gotten from the baby's purchasers; and they have threatened Bruno with a little sample of what they will do to him if he doesn't come through with the cash.

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On the Dardennes' La Promesse, Rosetta, The Son, and VEnfant

Desperate, he recruits one of his schoolboy accomplices, Steve, to steal a woman's purse as the latter sits on the back of a motor scooter that Bruno himself will pilot. But the woman screams, some men give chase, then the police give chase as well, as the film suddenly explodes into an adrenalin-charged car pursuit (so charged even though, or perhaps because, it lacks the usual percussive soundtrack and multiple camera angles) that proves to be both intensely physical and almost effortlessly metaphoric. Agonizingly, on the verge of being overtaken, Bruno and Steve plunge into the muddy river Meuse—a figurative as well as literal descent into the depths—so as to hide under a dock. But Steve flounders and Bruno has to save him from drowning. The Dardennes, always concerned with the relationship between adults and young people, thus use Steve as a vicar for Bruno's baby. The rescue itself is a dangerous, selfless act, particularly for a young man more interested in business transactions than physical pursuits of the kind typically found in "action films." Steve may survive, but the police find and arrest him anyway. Then, conscience-stricken, Bruno comes to the rescue again by turning himself in to free Steve. Slowly, through his powerful, emotionally-induced response to two quite distinct instances of hysterical paralysis suffered by his fellow creatures (first Sonia and next Steve), Bruno is being nudged toward transformation, toward spiritual and emotional growth. For it's he who is really the movie's eponymous child, even as the son in the Dardennes' film of the same name is the very apprentice who murdered the carpenter's infant boy. Bruno's final destination in UEnfant (like the protagonist's in Pickpocket) is prison: a kind of haven from the men to whom he owes money; a kind of hell where his ceaseless motion has no outlet; and also a vision of purgatory where his soul will be tested and perhaps saved. The very last scene, understated but overwhelming, deceptively taciturn yet profoundly moving, fulfills both the film's narrative and its meaning without the slightest touch of neatness or patness. The sense is that prices have been paid for this ending, that—unlike most sentiment—it is earned. His cockiness gone, Bruno sits down with Sonia, who is visiting him in jail (and who has been absent from the film up to this point for quite some time), and for once shows an emotion appropriate to the situation: he cries. What sets his crying off? Something as small as an offer from Sonia of vending-machine coffee—or, in this context, everything. The mystery in this motion picture that has been made so studiously out in the open, without mysteries and for all to see, is that now even a plastic cup matters. For the moment, Bruno's perspective has been reduced to that cup and the woman who proffered it. But the suggestion is


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that his perspective has begun to widen or expand, for Bruno's tearful yet gratified (and gratifying) response to Sonia's thoughtfulness should be evidence enough to him that every action—even one so small as offering a person a cup of coffee—has its consequences. And that/ after all, has been what this genuine "action film" or morality play has been trying to illustrate all along, on a much larger scale: that, to phrase the matter biblically, whatsoever a man soweth, so shall he reap. Moreover, consequences are still in store, or at least questions unresolved, for Bruno as well as Sonia. To wit: after Bruno gets out of jail, will this couple learn to live together humanely as adults? How will Bruno deal with his debt? And what kind of life awaits the heretofore hapless Jimmy? We do not know, and neither do the characters—the characters, for it is almost impossible in a film such as this to talk about them in any terms that include the actors who play them. Some directors (like Ingmar Bergman) lead us to admire their actors' art even while they are creating it. But not the Dardennes. Although certainly not content with facile verism, they have their actors (here including Dardenne veterans Olivier Gourmet, in a brief appearance as a detective, and Deborah Frangois as Sonia in her first film role) disappear behind their characters in the act of creating them. And those characters, of course, inhabit a world that is not dissimilar to our own. Yet the Dardennes see it not only as it is, but more so. They see what we may sense is there but don't always perceive, by which I mean the spirit that enlivens matter as well as matter itself, the soul that is immanent in the body (let alone the universe) and not just the body on its surface. For the Dardennes' perceptions, their persistence, their very modesty or, better, humanity, we can be grateful. As we can be thankful as well for the two colleagues who work with them on all their fiction features. The first is Marie-H&ene Dozo, an editor who understands the urgent economy in the brothers' work—not one instant too much or too little, particularly in this 100-minute movie, which has more "action" than we are accustomed to in a Dardenne film. The second is the cinematographer Alain Marcoen, who renders the grainy urban landscape unremittingly, in natural light, such that terms like "black and white" and "color" don't really enter into the picture. And, under the brothers' guidance, he dollies along in shot after shot, thereby making movement, velocity, the transience or subjectivity of space (if you will) integral components of L 'Enfant's drama. L'Enfant, then, is an unretouched, and rare, "baby picture," not the kind that Hollywood gives us on all too regular a basis. The Dardennes' film has a real baby in it, to be sure, but it also has a figurative one; it

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features some American names (baby Jimmy, baby stand-in Steve), just to remind viewers indirectly of the kind of movie it is not; and, most important, L'Enfant features a protagonist who ascends from the depths of his own hell to achieve redemption or transformation—however nascent— in the end. How Bruno, and to a lesser extent Sonia, wound up in the lower depths is less the focus of this film, though, than how they will get out, if not from a socioeconomic point of view then from a psychoemotional one. So L'Enfant can't really be called a naturalistic socialproblem picture, even if its immediate subject is the lumpen underclass. Spiritually-infused Social realism is what I would call it, of the kind found in Rosetta and The Son, as it marries the ephemeral arena of human tribulation to the eternal realm of divine dispensation. Art doesn't solve problems, the Dardennes thereby imply, nor does it dissolve them. The most it can do, and has done in all their films I have seen, is guilelessly bear witness to creation. That is all, and that is enough. The rest is up to a higher power.

THE BROTHERS DARDENNE: RESPONDING TO THE FACE OF THE OTHER (FAITH AND SPIRITUALITY IN MASTERS OF WORLD CINEMA, 2008) DOUG CUMMINGS

In the nearly seventy-year history of the Cannes Film Festival, only a handful of filmmakers have won the Palme d'Or twice—most recently, they include the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, for Rosetta (1999) and UEnfant (2005). Rising from relative obscurity (television documentaries about their local workers movement) in the '70s and '80s, the Dardennes burst into the international spotlight with their third feature,1 La Promesse (1996), a "minimalist" thriller focusing on an adolescent's moral crisis and personal transformation that set the tone for their ensuing work, widely praised for its aesthetic rigor and thematic depth. As The Nation's Stuart Klawans marveled in 2006, [With La Promesse,] the brothers seemed tofindit miraculously easy to be first-rate; and they have continued so. How comforting it has been through the last ten years to remember that they are working, that two filmmakers of our time have such gifts of spiritual scope and unembarrassed compassion and have the art to present their insights simply, almost humbly. "Simply" for the Dardennes, however, merely refers to their precision: a unity of location (always their postindustrial hometown), essentialized plots with little back-story, one or two major characters, handheld camerawork, and a prejudice against dialogue when silence will suffice. Yet the content and meaning of their films is anything but simple, offering dense, provocative and lingering meditations on the mysteries of human relationships, ethical discovery and personal awakening. The brothers were born in Seraing, Li&ge (a French-speaking region in Belgium) in the early 1950s, and were forbidden to watch movies or television by their strict father. "[We had] a strong Catholic upbringing," Jean-Pierre Dardenne told The Village Voice, "until we were in our teens and rejected what our father had imposed on us. But despite the coercive,

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Responding to the Face of the Other

puritanical elements of religion, our education taught us to acknowledge other people as human beings." Jean-Pierre Dardenne eventually studied acting at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion (IAD) and Luc Dardenne studied philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain. They both became documentary filmmakers after being inspired by Armand Gatti (a French political activist, foreign correspondent, playwright, and theater and film director), but Luc Dardenne's serious engagement of philosophy has always remained an integral part of their work. Perhaps their films' strongest ideological influence have been the writings of Lithuanian French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who was born in 1906 and published phenomenological studies before he spent most of World War II in a German labor camp. (Several members of his immediate family died in the Holocaust.) After the war, Levinas developed an original philosophy of ethics in which he challenged Western notions of ontology (the study of being) and rationality. Previously, ethics was thought to be a rational extrapolation of the autonomous individual, but Levinas claimed such calculation negated the mystery of others, reducing them to "knowable"—and potentially expendable—sameness. He reversed that trend, insisting that the face-to-face encounter with the other is what defines the individual. Levinas taught that ethics initiates all philosophy, suggesting that the other—someone who cannot be rationalized, neutralized, or possessed—demands a necessary response, a necessary responsibility that determines what it means to be human. For Levinas, this emphasized the value of human life; since the self exists only in relation to the other, the face of the other implicitly commands, "Thou shall not kill." Though he is considered a postmodernist (Jacques Derrida embraced his work2), Levinas's writing often incorporated his commitment to Judaism and commentaries on the Talmud. Levinas held that the face of the other contains a trace of the infinite Other—or God—an idea that recalls the obligation in the Jewish and Christian scriptures for believers to look after widows, orphans, and strangers. As John Caruana puts it: In both Judaism and Christianity, a profound link is therefore established between on the one hand the absoluteness of the divine and on the other the non-transferable moral debt that is owed to others in our lives—a debt that increases significantly with respect to the vulnerability of the other in question. For Levinas, the ethical commandment that comes from the other highlights the revelatory nature of ethics. The ethical always comes from the outside. In this sense, ethics is itself a kind of religious encounter, albeit hidden.3 (Caruana 5-6)


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Levinas died while the Dardennes were shooting La Promesse. In Luc Dardenne's highly illuminating diary published in 2005, On the Back of Our Images, he comments on Levinas's death: "[La Promesse] owes a lot to the reading of his books. His interpretation of face-to-face, the face as first discourse. Without these readings, would we have imagined [key scenes]? The entire film can be seen as an attempt to reach the face-to-face encounter" (Dardenne 56). In many ways, one could say the same about the Dardennes' subsequent three films—all of them culminate in a transformative moment when individuals fully respond to the demanding presence of others, and in the process are reborn as more self-aware, complete human beings. In La Promesse, a young boy who helps his father traffic illegal immigrants finds his world turned upside down when he responds to the request of a dying man and the man's tenacious wife. In Rosetta, a desperately unemployed teenager lost in a world of selfpreservation is forced to relate to a persistent young man. In The Son, a carpenter must address his child's killer, a teenager whose unexpected presence both fascinates and repels him. In L'Enfant, an amoral teenager sells his baby on the black market but discovers that his girlfriend and younger buddy demand responsibilities. The Dardennes are so obsessed with the idea of the face-to-face encounter they often reference it in interviews, citing a variety of stories, myths and films. One of their favorites is the Genesis story where God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son (and heir) Isaac, who is spared at the last moment. "Abraham doesn't have to kill Isaac," Luc Dardenne says, quoted in the Guardian, "and that's the foundation of humanity." Levinas himself suggested that it was Abraham's ethical "distance" from the first command to sacrifice Isaac that made him receptive to the second command to spare him (Levinas 1996, 77).4 The Dardennes are equally fascinated by F. W. Murnau's landmark 1927 film, Sunrise. "This film must have a strong grip on our subconscious," Luc Dardenne writes in his diary, "because we talk about it every time we set out to make a new film" (Dardenne 147). The movie details how a seductress convinces a man to murder his unsuspecting wife, whom he rows to the middle of a lake with the intention of drowning. Murnau emphasizes their faces—the wife tries to catch her husband's eye, but he studiously avoids her gaze. Finally, as if under great strain, he lifts his eyes and glaringly menaces her, and she begins to plead for her life. But suddenly, he throws his arms over his face and rushes back to his oars,franticallypaddling to shore. Typically, however, recording the face-to-face encounter (rather than explaining it), with all its ethical and spiritual implications, is a daunting task. For centuries, philosophers have grappled with the fact that the

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immaterial world of thoughts, spirits, and emotions—and attendant fields of study, like religion, morality, and ethics—are empirically indemonstrable. The famous empiricist David. Hume (1711-1776) argued that true knowledge can only come through the senses; although we might observe someone stabbing another person with a knife, we cannot know that "murder is wrong," it is a feeling or conviction applied to the measurable facts of hand, blade, body and blood. "The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object," he wrote (Hume 301). And while it may be forgotten given today's digital technology, motion pictures (live action as well as animation) have a radical dependence on the material world— only physical substances can be exposed or applied to celluloid. In fact, film may be the most literal of all art forms, and this quality has been the source of cinema's greatest discoveries as well as its greatest cliches. Many filmmakers choose the easy way out to express ideas—explanatory dialogue or pantomime or established iconography—but the results are typically unexceptional and quickly forgotten. The Dardennes, however, have not only chosen to tell stories about the face-to-face encounter, they've made it their raison d'etre to fashion a cinematic expression of the ethical moment with a challenging and brilliant use of camera, composition, editing, and a full arsenal of techniques. While there is clearly a difference between a personal and a cinematic encounter with the other, their films aesthetically facilitate a face-to-face experience for the viewer. Instead of de-emphasizing the material world, they emphasize it; they refuse to "cheat"; they restrict their cinematic vocabulary to commonplace locations, bodies, everyday objects, surfaces and sounds—their films are an empiricist's dream. Even their locations often determine their stories rather than the reverse (Danvers). Like so many great narrative artists before them, they show (or suggest) rather than tell; they insist that form provides meaning. "A film is the story of how it has been shot," Jean-Pierre Dardenne once remarked (Danvers). By focusing on an enigmatic protagonist and literally following him or her with a handheld camera through dramatic events, the Dardennes create a powerful experience for the viewer, presenting characters through a combination of proximity (close observation) and alterity (otherness), conditions key to Levinas's encounter. Both of these poles also recall the work of two historic filmmakers who have left deep marks on the brothers' work. "Again watched Germany\ Year Zero'' Luc Dardenne writes in his diary. "Always the same intensity, the same edge. It is our model" (Dardenne 33). Filmed in 1947 in the postwar ruins of Berlin, this drama directed by Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977) depicts a young boy named


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Edmund who lives with his sick father and unemployed family. Edmund desperately does whatever he can to find food and money, but it makes him vulnerable to the machinations of a former Nazi schoolteacher, who convinces him that the weak should die for the strong. Believing it will help his family survive, Edmund poisons his own father, but the gravity of his action later becomes clear to him; in deep distress, he throws himself off a high-rise that looms over his destitute city. Rossellini's film is a remarkable work that predates many Dardennian concerns—thematic (a resilient but impressionable youth attempting to form a conscience in a depleted city) as well as stylistic (quasidocumentary use of locations and an intense visual concentration on the protagonist), Rossellini's film is a key example of the Trummerfilm, of "rubble film," in postwar German cinema, a genre qtitic-programmer Mike Hertenstein summarizes as a "fiction [that] described the humbled and broken Third Reich as a nation in post-traumatic stress." The Dardennes* broken world is contemporary Seraing; once a thriving working-class city on the Meuse River with renowned steel and coal facilities, Seraing has economically degenerated since the mid-1970s into a postindustrial age of abandoned blast factories and over 27% unemployment.5 As in rubble films, however, the depleted social resources seen in the Dardenne films form a productive soil for stories of rebirth and regeneration. "Somehow just talking about it," Hertenstein writes of rubble films, "describing the survivors emerging from the ruins-—physical, psychological, ideological— pointed the way toward a certain kind of hopefulness, a sense of green shoots groping toward the sun from between shards of blood-stained bricks." Because the Dardennes set their stories in such strikingly gritty locations and focus on desperate, marginalized characters—typically ignored by movies as well as society—their work is sometimes assumed to be "merely" social realist. But such a reading dramatically reduces the deep connections they make between locales and characters, which are never simply victims but resilient and resourceful human beings attempting to cope with economic realities. As the great French critic (and Catholic humanist) Andrd Bazin wrote of Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) and Germany, Year Zero: Events and people are never introduced in support of a social thesis—but the thesis emerges fully armed and all the more irrefutable because it is presented to us as something thrown into the bargain. It is our intelligence that discerns and shapes it, not the film. (Bazin 52-53) In other words, the social problem informs the major thematic problem,

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which is the necessity of personal development. In similar fashion, the Dardennes exhibit a profound concern for adolescents and the pathways of ethical revelation in the absence of social or parental guidance. Luc Dardenne told Cineaste: We do not wish to get carried away with accusations against adults, against parents, hut, as La Promesse [with its story of a father who teaches his son to lie, cheat and steal] suggests, we feel that these days it is as if we adults no longer want to die to allow the generation coming after us to live. In order to educate someone, you have to know how to die so that he or she can live; so that, simply put, they can take your place..... That is a bit of what we felt and what we attempted to show, how adults were trying to be adolescents and not fathers, not mothers—just buddies. In economically devastated cities with dissolved family structures, the youth must discover humanity's future through the face of the other. (Rossellini understood this, showing how Edmund's social isolation and largely absent father eventually contributed to the boy's death.) Moreover, the style of Germany, Year Zero suggests inspiration for the Dardennes' face-to-face aesthetic. Rossellini famously emphasizes lengthy, contemplative shots of Edmund walking through the bombed city, a moving camera tracking the boy's movements and scrutinizing his face from moment to moment as he wanders aimlessly through the ruins, a physical and visual metaphor for the confusion and turmoil within him.6 Bazin writes: Rossellini directs facts, it is as if his characters were haunted by some demon of movement. . . . Gesture, change, physical movement constitute for Rossellini the essence of human reality.. . . The world of Rossellini is a world of pure acts, unimportant in themselves but preparing the way (as if unbeknownst to God himself) for the sudden dazzling revelation of their meaning. (100) In film after film, the Dardennes themselves obsessively focus on the compelling faces, bodies and movements of their characters. The brothers are even sensitive to such physicalities in real life, once wondering aloud whether they would have imagined their story for UEnfant if they hadn't first noticed a young woman forcefully pushing a baby carriage through the street (Bonnaud). Rosetta begins dramatically in medias res with a close-up of a young woman wearing a clean-room uniform as she plunges her way through a factory, accosting and evading various employees and supervisors, demanding to know why she has been fired. Throughout, the camera is


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never more than a few feet from her, chasing her as she slams into doors, zigzags through hallways, and dodges physical barriers. Moments after the film begins, it's already clear that Rosetta is a fearless and determined young worker in crisis. Jean-Pierre Dardenne explained in an interview: We have tried to film a human being, a person who speaks directly to the viewers. There's no intermediary between the eye of the spectator facing the screen and the person on the screen, her face, body, shoulders, arms and legs. We wanted to have as little intervention as possible. It had to be an almost physical relationship. The person in the cinema departs together with Rosetta. (Rabourdin) , Rossellini once noted that he preferred making films to writing novels because "the character will be pursued and haunted: contemporary anxiety derives precisely from this inability to escape the implacable eye of the lens."7 If this was true for Rossellini, whose only mobile resources were dolly tracks and vehicles, it's doubly true for the Dardennes, whose aggressive use of the handheld camera not only exhibits an implacable eye, but an almost anxiety-provoking presence—so much so that they coined their own term for it: "corps-camera," or body-camera. The term, no doubt, is a reference to Dziga Vertov's famous "kino-eye," a concept the Russian filmmaker used to describe the cinema's ability (through techniques such as slow motion or the use of close-ups) to perceive truth inaccessible to the naked eye. For the Dardennes, however, participation and proximity are just as important as perception. In his diary, Luc Dardenne writes: The bodily movements of Benoit Dervaux (the camera operator) carrying the camera are more subtle, livelier, more sensitive and more complex than any movement carried out with machinery. His chest, his pelvis, his legs, his feet are those of a dancer. With Amaury Dequenne (his assistant) who accompanies and supports him in his movements, they form a single body-camera. (Dardenne 175) There is prolonged, nuanced motion in the images of the Dardennes that accentuates and even incarnates a sense of human subjectivity and physical proximity.8 Classical Hollywood film style typically establishes setting before it introduces characters, but the Dardennes begin and end with character, and convey setting in piecemeal fashion solely as it pertains to the action. Thus, they toy with the ambiguity of the settings glimpsed in their films, teasing the viewer into observing closely and mentally piecing together and organizing the space from the partial views the body-camera provides.

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This method is particularly evident in L'Enfant, where some locations figure prominently at regular intervals. Bruno climbs the staircase leading to Sonia's apartment a number of times in the film, and with each repetition the staircase is filmed from a slightly different angle; this not only encourages the viewer to mentally construct the setting from the partial glimpses, but on a deeper level visually suggests the gradual development of Bruno's own awareness, both physical and moral. It's important to note that for Levinas, proximity isn't merely a physical nearness but a pre-conscious, obsessive, human approach that paradoxically emphasizes the other's alterity and uniqueness. Proximity isn't about understanding or identification because the other can never be fully known or replaced; but like the (white) Igor in La Promesse, who is so fascinated by the (black) Assita's smiling passport photo that he dabs typewriter correction fluid on his teeth in front of a mirror, the other's foreignness is commanding. "Proximity is not a state, a repose, but, a restlessness," writes Levinas (Otherwise 86). "Proximity, difference which is non-indifference, is responsibility" (139).9 Accordingly, the Dardennes forego any subjective camerawork that might suggest the viewer could share the perceptions of characters, and instead utilize a visual technique that infuses a sense of proximity with the unknown: A common point between Olivier [in The Son] and Rosetta: the secrecy, when we film Rosetta looking through the slightly open door of the waffle stand, we try to place the eye of the camera so that it can't see all that Rosetta sees while being very close to Rosetta's point of view, almost seeing what she sees. Between seeing what Rosetta sees, and almost seeing what Rosetta sees, there is a gap that creates for the viewer the tension of the secret. The more the boundaries of this gap converge without joining, the more the force of the secret that connects them intensifies. (Dardenne 130) For the Dardennes, this "secret" highlights the unknown aspect of a character's perception that is wholly inaccessible to the viewer, but the brothers' flirtation with that perception creates a compelling ellipse that entices the viewer.10 This introduces the second major (and dialectically opposed) aspect of the filmmakers' face-to-face aesthetic along with their Rossellinian observation and proximity—their sense of alterity, or mystery and otherness in regards to characters and events. And perhaps no other narrative filmmaker has excelled at infusing his films with this quality than the French master Robert Bresson (1901-1999), who was such a proponent of enigma and ellipsis that he once wrote, "One does not create by adding, but by taking away" (Bresson 96). The Dardennes, who in 2007 filmed a


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clever and moving three-minute homage to Bresson entitled Dans UObscurite {Darkness)11, expressed a similar sentiment when Jean-Pierre Dardenne told the Guardian, "In order to film what you want to show on a face or a body, you first have to decide what you want to hide." For Bresson and the Dardennes, art lies in stripping away all that is unnecessary and provocatively leaving gaps or questions, so that what remains is concrete and essential and everything else is a mystery that beckons the viewer/ In this way, their work demands active, moment-tomoment interpretation that dovetails into larger questions regarding a film's overall meaning. "[Rosetta] grabs [the viewer] by the collar," Luc Dardenne says, "and at the end sits him down again, saying: now you sort it out!" (Rabourdin). Like the face of the other, the immediate but inscrutable quality of their films demands a response. The Son is a film that emphasizes alterity and mystery to an uncommon degree—its opening image (behind the credits) is so shadowy it's virtually indecipherable until it tilts up to reveal the back of Olivier's head and neck in extreme close-up; not only is his character introduced from behind, but for the next few scenes, edited in an abrupt manner, the viewer only catches glimpses of his face and has to glean from the action and incidental dialogue that he's a carpentry instructor. Olivier Gourmet, who plays Olivier (the role was written for him), would complain to the Dardennes that he was doing very little "acting" in the film (Danvers), yet they would insist that Gourmet's "voice, his movements and his looks had to be neutral" (Houba). The more a character recedes from the viewer, the brothers know, the more closely and carefully an attentive viewer will scrutinize the character. Despite Gourmet's complaints, he would go on to win best actor at the Cannes Film Festival; as Bresson once wrote, "The thing that matters is not what [actors] show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them" (Bresson 15). The Dardennes portray Olivier secretly observing a new student (who is barely glimpsed for the first twenty minutes of the film), having an awkward conversation with someone who may be his ex-wife, and obsessively following the student at school and at home. While every narrative film establishes a pattern of question and answer within its plot, The Son is extremely parsimonious with closure. Stylistically, the Dardennes' body-camera complicates scenes by its constant motion and hovering close-ups, often from the back of Olivier, thus obscuring easy readings of his face. And the film's assembly of images—by editor MarieH61£ne Dozo, who also cut the excellent and very Dardenne-like 2006 Chadian film Daratt (Dry Season)—consistently forgoes establishing shots and jumps in medias res from scene to scene, close-up to close-up,

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creating a visual momentum that allows the viewer little time to establish bearings. It's not until about thirty minutes into the film, with Olivier's second scene with his ex-wife, that central plot questions begin to crystallize; the boy is named Francis and he killed the couple's son, and Olivier is considering the possibility of accepting Francis as his student. "Olivier seems mysterious," Luc Dardenne told the French journal Multitudes, "he seems unfathomable. He's a person like anyone else" (Houba). No advocates of cheap grace, it was very important to the Dardennes that Olivier's anger toward Francis was responsibly conveyed. "We didn't want to seem angelic," Luc Dardenne said, explaining that the movie was filmed in such a way that it could've climaxed with revenge. "Let us not fall into easy forgiveness, but let us also not fall into easy revenge" (Houba). Olivier's moral ambiguity is crucial for the film's tension and is visually emphasized by the camera's constant focus of the back of his neck. In his interview with Pascal Houba, Luc Dardenne points out that Levinas himself often referred to a scene in Vasily Grossman's 1960 Soviet underground novel Life and Fate where the nape of a neck addresses a character as powerfully as a face itself.12 "Grossman isn't saying that the nape is a face," Levinas explained, "but that all the weakness, all the mortality, all the naked and disarmed mortality of the other can be read from it" (Levinas, Entre Nous 232). The Dardennes take full advantage of the tension and vulnerability expressed by Olivier's nape, preferring its enigmatic power to the face itself, which the viewer is more accustomed to reading, but often in more "obvious" or cliched terms. The brothers want the viewer to look at Olivier and contemplate the mystery of his inner life. This moral suspense in The Son climaxes with the Dardennes' belief in the inability of the cinema to adequately register the precise moment—the ethical realization—of the face-to-face encounter. Luc Dardenne explains, In the script, we wrote the scene where Olivier is strangling the boy and he stops. Why does he stop? It's something, I think, which doesn't have an answer. We might think it's possible to see this moment when he stops, when the eyes, the face, could translate all this complexity for us, to betray this moment. But I think it's impossible. (Houba) When Olivier ultimately pins Francis down in the woods and clasps his hands around the boy's neck, the body-camera swings from Francis' face and frames Olivier's head looking down; after a moment, it returns to Francis, but Olivier's hands have released him. Thus the Dardennes convey the physics of the scene while retaining its essential mystery. "I have always thought of [the mystery], because of Levinas, but also


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because of Murnau's film, Sunrise" Luc Dardenne continues. "It is a question that has always haunted me. What occurs when someone is caught up in the moment to kill and then stops? What can we see? I believe that we can see nothing. It is invisible. And yet, it should nevertheless be filmed" (Houba). For the Dardennes, that mystery is an invitation. In all their recent films, the viewer watches characters watching others, mediated by an intense visual dialectic of proximity and alterity that creates a powerful doubling effect between the protagonist's experience and the viewer's experience; both are prompted to discover ethical implication through the face of the other. The Dardennes carefully render each of their films in ways that demand a response. "Accustom the public to divining the whole of which they are given only a part," wrote Bresson. "Make people diviners. Make them desire it" (Bresson 107). Known for their abrupt endings in which their final image cuts to black in medias res shortly after an ultimate encounter, the Dardenne cinema challenges the viewer to consider the implications of a face-to-face awakening. lean-Pierre Dardenne says, Rosetta is this girl who is at war, she attacks a fortress wanting to enter it. And that fortress is society. She herself is walled in by it. . . . For ninety minutes she sees no one because she feels no one sees her. She feels there is no place for her and that she may disappear. And then suddenly she feels someone animates her. (Rabourdin) In similar fashion, the Dardenne cinema brings revelation and conviction to its most enthusiastic recipients.

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Notes 1

The Dardennes' first feature, Falsch (1986), played at the Cannes Film Festival, but neither it nor Je pense a vous (1992) is stylistically in the same vein as the films that follow, and the earlier two were not as critically well received. The brothers creatively redefined themselves for La Promesse, even forming a new production company, "Les Films du Fleuve," through which they have produced all their subsequent work. 2 Derrida delivered the eulogy at Levinas's funeral on December 27, 1995. 3 Cuarana's essay is an in-depth and cogent exploration of the writings of Levinas in relation to the Dardennes, and includes Levinas's critique of aesthetics. 4 Levinas writes: "Abraham's attentiveness to the voice that leads him back to the ethical order, in forbidding him to perform a human sacrifice, is the highest point in the drama. That he obeyed the first voice is astonishing: that he had sufficient distance with respect to that obedience to hear the second voice—that is the essential." 5 Reported by Statistics Belgium (http://www.statbel.fgov.be). 6 Rossellini would take this preference for long takes to extremes with his next film, Stromboli (1950), as Karin (Ingrid Bergman) wanders endlessly around a volcanic island, experiences a spiritual epiphany, and rediscovers the will to live. 7 As cited by Peter Brunette, quoting R. M. DeAngelis's interview with the filmmaker, "Rossellini romanziere." 8 When I interviewed the Dardennes in 2005, Jean-Pierre Dardenne told me their camera movements are determined by the movements of their actors, and not viceversa: "Every morning that we shoot, we rehearse on location with the actors. We don't rehearse the dialogue, only the movements and rhythm. And we decide where we're going to place the camera; often it's dependent on how the actors have moved and where they've stopped. We need to see this happening in front of us in order to plan it." 9 Alphonso Lingis, the English translator of Levinas's Otherwise than Being, writes in his introduction: 'The relationship with alterity, which is what escapes apprehension, exceeds all comprehension, is infinitely remote, is, paradoxically enough, the most extreme immediacy, proximity closer than presence, obsessive contact." 10 Luc Dardenne notes in his diary that they discovered this visual technique in Kieslowski's riveting series, The Decalogue (1988). 11 The short film was one of 33 commissioned for the French omnibus film Chacun son cinema for the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. Through ambiguous shadows, the camera follows a teenager attempting to pick the pocket of a young woman in a movie theater watching (offscreen) the ending of Bresson's Au hazard, Balthazar (1966). My review can be found here: . 12 Grossman writes of a line of people anxiously awaiting letters from loved ones: "Yevgenia had never realized that the human back could be so expressive, could so vividly reflect a person's state of mind. People had a particular way of craning


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their necks as they came up to the window; their backs, with their raised, tensed shoulders, seemed to be crying, to be sobbing and screaming" (683).

Works Cited Andrew, Geoff. "Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne." Guardian Unlimited. February 11,2006. Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema? Volume 2. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Bonnaud, Fr&idric. Interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. L'Enfant. DVD. USA: Sony Pictures, 2006. Bresson, Robert. Notes on the Cinematographer. Trans. Jonathan Griffin. London: Quartet Books, 1986. Brunette, Peter. Roberto Rossellini. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987 Caruana, John. "Representing the Hidden Drama of Ethics: Levinas and the Dardenne Brothers." The Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference. Hamilton, Ontario. 2007. Cummings, Doug. "Interview with the Dardennes." March 2006. . Danvers, Louis. Interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The Son. DVD. USA: New Yorker Video, 2004. Dardenne, Luc. Au dos de nos images. Paris: Seuil, 2005. Grossman, Vasily. Life and Fate. Trans. Robert Chandler. New York: New York Review Books, 2006. Hertenstein, Mike. "Holy Moments & Holy Fools: The Postwar Journey of Roberto Rossellini." November 2006. Houba, Pascal. "Dans le dos de Tange de l'histoire." Multitudes Web. January 2003. . Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Klawans, Stuart. "The Wild Child." The Nation. April 10,2006. Levinas, Emmanuel. "A Propos of 'Kierkegaard vivantV Proper Names. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 1996. Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre Nous. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. —. Otherwise than Being. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981.

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Lim, Dennis. "Working Family." The Village Voice. March 21, 2006. Rabourdin, Dominique. La Bataille des Dardenne. Interview with JeanPierre and Luc Dardenne. Rosetta/La Promesse. DVD. England: Artificial Eye, 2001. West, Joan, and Dennis West. "Taking the Measure of Human Relationships: An Interview with the Dardenne Brothers." Cineaste. Fall 2003.

THE DARDENNE BROTHERS: AN ARGUMENT FOR A FAR MORE CRITICAL APPRAISAL, OR, WHAT ABOUT THE "EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES"? {WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE, 30 JUNE 2006 & 29 SEPTEMBER 2008) DAVID WALSH

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (born 1951 and 1954, respectively) are a well-known and respected film directing team from Belgium. After years of making socially-oriented documentaries, they began writing and directing feature films in the 1990s. The brothers have developed an international following with La Promesse (The Promise, 1996), Rosetta (1999), Le Fils (The Son, 2002) and, most recently, VEnfant (The Child, 2005). The Dardennes created each of these works in their native region of southern, French-speaking Belgium, on a small budget, making prominent use of handheld cameras and calling on the services of non-professional or unknown performers. Each film has treated working class life or particular details of that life—the impact of work or lack of work, relationships between generations—with undoubted seriousness and concern. Furthermore, all the Dardenne films involve moral issues posed by crises in the lives of their central characters: a teenaged boy makes a commitment in La Promesse to a dying immigrant worker, killed in the employ of the boy's father, an exploiter of such labor; a young woman, Rosetta, living in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother, is determined, at apparently any cost, including betraying others in her own situation, to find work; in Le Fils, a carpentry teacher in a special school for recently released offenders discovers that one of his charges was responsible for his son's tragic death five years before. In UEnfant, too, a socio-morality tale unfolds. Bruno (Jer^mie Renier) is a smalltime thief and fence in the city of Seraing, who splits his time between a dismal apartment and a shack on the banks of the river Meuse. His girl friend Sonia (Deborah Francois) has just given birth, for which

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An Argument for a Far More Critical Appraisal

event Bruno did not bother to turn up at the hospital. More than anything, he seems benumbed; his life has made him quite distant from others around him. Through his contact with a criminal ring, he learns how much money is to be made through selling newborns. One afternoon, Bruno takes his infant son for a stroll and promptly organizes his sale. When he later informs Sonia what he's done ("We can have another one"), she faints. In the hospital she denounces him to the police. He quickly recovers the baby, but the criminals demand that he pay a large indemnity for their lost profits. And Sonia, for her part—her child restored to her—understandably will have nothing to do with Bruno. He now has no home, no money and no girl friend. He stages a robbery, with his young confederate Steve (Jeremie Segard), but bystanders alert police and a chase ensues. Bruno and Steve are forced to submerge themselves in the river to escape capture. The cops eventually arrest his partner. Stricken by a newfound conscience, Bruno turns himself in to police. In a final scene, Sonia visits Bruno in prison, and he breaks down in tears. The Dardenne brothers have numerous admirers. They have been greeted with enthusiasm by many no doubt genuinely disturbed by the impoverished state of contemporary cinema. A recent article in Cineaste magazine, for example, bore the somewhat ambitious title "Reinventing Realism: The Art and Politics of the Dardenne Brothers." Critics have not been stinting with their praise for LyEnfant, declaring it a masterpiece. But in my view, the Dardennes' films are not satisfying artistic works. I've found each to be largely dull (despite the feverish undercurrent), dramatically unconvincing, and strangely unmoving. Moreover, their obsessive attention to the particular (exemplified by the irritating and intrusive camera in Rosetta, which hardly leaves the central character for an instant) at the expense of the social and historical context ultimately provides a distorted picture of contemporary life. It diverts attention from the structures responsible for human suffering and creates the impression, inadvertently or not, that the blame for social ills lies at least in part with their victims. VEnfant is realistic about some things, less so about others. The film places the viewer squarely in the midst of Seraing, a decaying industrial town, in a region that was one of the birthplaces of modern capitalism. Grim apartments, noisy highways, shops, bars, police stations—one has no doubt about the authenticity of detail. However, while Bruno and Sonia pass before this background of closed factories and run-down housing, are they ever truly situated in it? What is the relationship between this social environment and the behavior of the protagonists? Is there any necessary


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relationship? One senses that the Dardennes, as is too often the case, would like to have their cake and eat it too. Their depiction of the bleak conditions provides them a certain credibility, but then the filmmakers largely turn their backs on the implications of those conditions. The latter are largely taken for granted; they are not active in the lives of their characters. As though once sprung forth from those circumstances, the young people were free to do whatever they liked. Bruno's character and progression, for example, are implausible. He may very well exist in a state of deep anomie, but he's clearly not unobservant about people. After seeing Sonia's deep affection for the baby, his astonishment at her response to his sale of the child is simply not credible. What did he expect? Or, alternatively, if he is such a brute or so remote from human feeling, why does he experience such a painless transformation? The conversion is unconvincing from every point of view. Moreover, the dismissal of Sonia from the screen is all too easy. She would have more things to say on the matter. Dialogue is a part of cinema, too. Permit us the suspicion, at least until convinced otherwise, that the Dardennes shy away from dramatic confrontations because they are incapable of rendering them adequately. There are many deeply and even fatally damaged people on earth— people capable of selling their children for a few thousand dollars or euros. How does someone like that reject and overcome such a condition? Through a mere quantitative extension of what has come before, no matter how hair-raising? It seems highly unlikely. Why should Bruno develop a conscience? Something from the outside needs to penetrate such a thick hide. A Bruno, if we take his depraved character at face value, would need to develop a rational grasp of the sources of his own condition and behavior. How could he arrive at such an understanding? Through politics, for example, through contact with a mass movement that challenged the society's foundations. History demonstrates that such movements may reach and transform the most damaged, lumpen elements. The theory of "spontaneous self-regeneration" is simply wrongheaded. In any case, what are the implications of such a theory? Have the Dardennes worked this through? I hope not. What they are proposing here (and, in one fashion or another, in all their films)—that Bruno face up to his responsibilities as an adult and a father, become more fully human—is preached by countless columnists, politicians, academics and pundits of every stripe on a daily basis. How banal! And how beside the point! What produced Bruno's behavior in the first place? Wretched social conditions, his own hopelessness and alienation. None of that has changed. Even were a single Bruno to regenerate himself miraculously, in the manner the

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Dardennes propose, there would be a thousand or ten thousand others. This is fundamentally a social problem, not an individual moral one. For the working class, some degree of scientific consciousness of its own position is the starting-point for a higher moral view; the debasement of its most backward layers is rooted in exploitation. The question remains open whether the film is even especially sympathetic toward its characters. L'Enfant proceeds from their individual iniquities toward the broader social horizon; in some unpleasant manner, Bruno and the others become implicated in the decay of the city, and not the other way around. This is not a film that indicts Belgian capitalism for its criminal treatment of the younger generation. Again, this is not social realism in any oppositional sense. Stripped of its trappings, it amounts to petty bourgeois moralizing about the failings of the most oppressed and beaten down. One feels tempted to repeat after Brecht: "Not the wickedness of the poor have you shown me, but The Poverty of the Poor." The Dardennes roll their eyes, more or less, when the issue of their political views is raised. They are "beyond all that." And in this precisely lies the source of their appeal. There is no reason to be overly harsh about this. The brothers are filmmakers, not politicians. They are not leading a political tendency. They are capable of honest moments. Their intentions are probably honorable. But they have a history; they are social creatures, just like everyone else, and this emerges in their work. Their history plays a role today, unhappily, more in giving the weakest aspects of their work a "progressive" coating than in anything else. Born in Seraing, "a workingclass town where daily life revolved around the sirens of steel mills and coal mines," the Dardenne brothers grew up in and had to imbibe an environment with strong left-wing and socialist traditions, extending back more than a century. In 1960, when they were still children, Belgium experienced a bitterly fought general strike, which shook the society to its foundations and had European-wide reverberations. In recent decades, Wallonia (the French-speaking region of southern Belgium, home to heavy industry), has suffered a severe economic decline. Prolonged recessions in the 1980s brought about the closure of factories and mines, and the growth of permanently high unemployment (officially 18.6 percent in November 2005). As elsewhere, national governments, which often include the Belgian Socialist Party, have responded with austerity measures and attacks on the social safety net. The Dardennes obviously held radical convictions as young people. In the early 1970s, they encountered writer and anarchist Armand Gatti, with whom they collaborated in theater and video work. Later they struck out on their own. Jean-Pierre Dardenne explains: "We'd shoot strikes, and


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show the footage at union meetings. . . . Or we'd go into low-income housing projects and videotape people who'd done something with their lives, who'd been active in the Resistance or the labor movement. On Sundays, we'd find a place in the projects, a garage or an apartment, and we'd show the tapes. We were trying to create links between people through video" (Village Voice). In the late 1970s, they began making documentaries for Belgian television, on the Resistance, on the 1960 general strike, on the conditions of immigrant workers and similar subjects. They were naturally affected by the ebbing of the radical tide of the 1970s. Moreover, in the intervening decades, globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union and "existing socialism" (Stalinism), the extended decay of the trade unions, the disintegration of old organizations and allegiances, the disappearance of entire communities, the temporary weakening of the most elementary "fellow feeling"—all this has had an impact. Jean-Pierre Dardenne told an interviewer for Cineaste several years ago: "The working class is no longer the working class. It is no longer structured as it was at the beginning of the last century. We are truly at the end of an age, of industry, of what we have known for a hundred years. Perhaps in an immediate sense, it is because we have lived a good part of our lives within this time that we choose to film it and to anchor our stories around these de-classed people." Considering their origins, and the optimism that must have existed in certain quarters about the possibility of social change in the 1960s and 1970s, the Dardennes' is a difficult history, with perhaps more than its share of missed opportunities. One can feel a certain sympathy. However, one cannot afford to be sentimental. Like everyone else, the brothers had the responsibility to work these complex problems through. Instead* one feels that they have allowed events to wear down their ideological defenses, that they carry their disappointments (in the working class, in radical change) with them, semi-consciously, and insert those in their studies of the present. They maintain their orientation at this point toward the plight of ordinary people, but they don't see that the content of that orientation has shifted dramatically. But it is this, the element that has been worn away, that finds a response. Emilie Bickerton in Cineaste, in the aforementioned piece, is relatively forthright: "What the Dardennes represent is the way cinema can be political today, their real originality coming from their refusal to be cynical and struggle against what they call the loss of confidence in man. This can't be achieved by making characters mouthpieces for particular ideas or representative of predicaments and struggles. This appeal to class

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consciousness is an old strategy and it is the lack of such an appeal in the Dardennes' work that makes them so interesting today." As though anyone with a brain wanted "mouthpieces" of any kind. But rich and serious work must contain a protest against existing conditions and includes partisanship. Neutrality, much less indifference, in the social arena has nothing in common with honesty and objectivity. Mike Bartlett, writing for Close-Up Film in Britain, asks: "Where, in short, does the European who falls in the interstices between the vulgar and out-dated concepts of Left and Right find a voice? The answer, I believe, lies across the Channel in Belgium—brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne." He argues that "the Dardennes' is a tough love-—it shows that the very systems that the Left rail against make people shrewd, calculating, ruthless. They want the audience to earn their urge to change society by showing people as they really are, not by flattering pre-ordained ideas and mollycoddling them through the film." No one is in favor of prettifying the oppressed, but a modicum of sympathy would be something. One can see in such a case how the Dardennes, perhaps against their will, pick up the support of people who certainly have no intention of "mollycoddling" the poor and the working class. Even the phraseology used is that of right-wing, law-and-order politicians. In sum, in my opinion, the Dardennes don't offer a way out of the present artistic impasse; rather, their films are another expression, in an admittedly sophisticated form, of that same crisis. In the final analysis, their popularity within certain circles stems from their ability to combine a "social realist" look and feel to their films, which suggests (and perhaps intends) social criticism and opposition, with quite conformist themes and moods entirely compatible with official moralizing and complacency. The brothers' sincerity is not at issue here, their art and their ideas are. In any event, the unfolding economic crisis, with its vast social and political implications, will propel film writers and directors like them to think about all sorts of questions that they considered settled or hadn't considered at all. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was a defining moment in modern American culture, as well as its political life, and the present widespread discrediting of the "free market" system will have a similarly radicalizing effect globally. We can only add: it's about time. You could understand the objective difficulties, lodged in decades of political reaction and the social qualities and experiences (or lack thereof) of the film artists, and still protest against the all-too-weak and pallid representations of life generated by most filmmakers in the last fifteen years or so in particular. Patience with the historical process is not the same thing as a passive "reconciliation with reality." Even now, some


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writers and directors, who identify themselves with the establishment, will no doubt try to pretend that nothing has happened, but the most thoughtful and sensitive will make the new situation the starting point for important work. Complications and difficulties will arise, but they will be healthy ones. Certain concepts will inevitably return to the discussion in artistic circles: social class, capitalist crisis, objective forces, socialism. A great many stupid ideas, taken for granted only a few years or even months ago, about the inadvisability or even impossibility of grasping social life and history in art, will dissipate. This change in the artists' thinking will itself validate the materialist conception that the development of the world shapes the development of art. "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life" (Marx, The German Ideology). None of this, of course, will take place easily or overnight. A great many vested interests have been built up over the last period, and not all of them "spiritual," by any means. Reputations, careers and incomes will be at stake. A period of political reaction or stagnation saps the confidence of artists in the ability of masses of people to oppose attacks on their basic rights and conditions, much less their capacity to challenge fundamentally the existing order. All sorts of retrograde notions crop up, and oppositional views, unless guided by longer-term and more substantial perspectives, are eroded. Many former political "radicals" make their peace, in one fashion or another, with the status quo. For artists of "left" views, the situation is not always so clear-cut. They are not politicians and, therefore, not immediately under the same pressures or obligations. Moreover, the artists often "learn" their politics in the form of sentiments and feelings bound up with the concrete imagery they create. Those ideological views are somehow embedded in the artistic products and not so easily detached from them. It will be found that honest artists generally "lag behind" social reality and their political and philosophical views tend to be cloudy, but those views, once absorbed, are liable to endure. Of course, much depends on the concrete conditions, the relations between the intellectuals and the working class in a given country, and so on. It should be noted that the most "political" filmmakers may be more susceptible to changes in popular mood and social climate. As for the Dardenne brothers, in recent years, critics and admirers have made considerable claims for them—for example, that they are "reinventing realism"—and the Dardennes have developed a substantial following, especially among young people. This is understandable. During one of the worst decades in the history of the movies, where trivial and

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self-involved work largely held sway, the brothers continued to make relatively low-budget films in working class areas, with non-professionals or, at any rate, without glamorous performers. Each of their films (La Promesse, Rosetta, Le Fils, L'Enfant, and now, The Silence ofLorna), as I note above, "has treated working class life or particular details of that life—the impact of work or lack of work, relationships between generations—with undoubted seriousness and concern.,, This "seriousness" is accentuated, in many minds, by the Dardennes' frequent use of handheld cameras and available light, the absence of musical scores or soundtracks, subdued acting and cinematography. They've also produced and presumably assisted with a number of films by newer directors. I spoke to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne in Toronto in September 2008, and they were personable and sincere. That being said, there is still the matter of the artistic quality of their films. The fact remains, in my view, that their dramas are rather uninspired and, ultimately, contrived. Moreover, their chilly, matter-of-fact "realism" expresses an ambiguous attitude toward the working class characters that borders on the unsympathetic. This is bound up, in my opinion, in large measure with the social and political problems referred to above. In the case at hand, these problems find reflection in the semi-erosion of the Dardenne brothers' leftist views over the last quarter-century and their partial, probably unconscious reconciliation with various ideological positions that have come to the fore. Like many somewhat (or more than that) discouraged radicals, while they are no doubt prepared to accept in principle the existence of class society, the necessity of a social struggle, and the importance of historical issues, what they see as determinant are the "real concerns" that people face in their daily lives and the moral choices they make; existence, in other words, as it is "genuinely lived." Although the general conditions of modern life are presented, those tend to recede from the Dardennes' films, and we are left with an examination of those moral choices, and inevitably, with the impression that the individuals are primarily responsible for the outcome. (A more profound approach would start out "from the real premises and . . . not abandon them for a moment" [Ibid.].) In their latest feature, The Silence of Lorna, the title character is a young Albanian woman Irving in Li&ge, a city in French-speaking southern Belgium (and one of the oldest industrial centers in the world). Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) wants to open a snack bar with her boyfriend, Sokol (Alban Ukaj), who is away working. To raise the funds, she has agreed to the plan of a local mafia boss, Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), and


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married a drug addict—Claudy (Jerdmie Renier)—for money so she can obtain Belgian citizenship. She's then supposed to end that marriage and marry a Russian mobster in order that he, in turn, can be naturalized. Fabrizio wants to speed up the process, and save a good deal of money, by arranging for Claudy to die from an overdose. Lorna, to begin with, is not disturbed by this prospect, nor is Sokol. When we first see her, Lorna is as cold and impersonal as she can be in her relations with Claudy. When he makes efforts to clean himself up, relying on her in the process, she develops feelings for him. She makes efforts to obtain a speedy divorce, and promises to take the money Claudy will have to be paid (at the time of the divorce) out of her share of the eventual earnings from the Russians, but the criminals have other, more ruthless plans. The discovery later that she's pregnant deepens her moral crisis. This film is superior, in my view, to UEnfant, the Dardennes' previous work, because of a somewhat more plausible narrative and the presence of Dobroshi, a talented actress from Kosovo. At several moments, Lorna's desperate situation is presented in a moving and convincing manner. Nonetheless, in the end, The Silence of Lorna suffers from some of the same defects as the Dardennes' earlier films. Again, in the first place, the filmmakers tend to confuse flatness with realism. For the most part, the characters are unappealing and the brothers treat them coldly. Even Lorna is only extended affection at certain moments. In the most remarkable films, novels and plays, the creators both love and criticize their creations deeply. The drama is contrived. Why, for example, does the Russian Mr. Big not simply find a female Belgian smack addict to marry and kill? It could simply be that the only complaisant addict available was Claudy, or it could be that playing it at one remove like this puts the police off the scent. Certainly, what police investigation there is here looks risibly perfunctory. However gripping the premise, then, the Dardennes have neglected the simplicity and clarity that characterized such films as Rosetta and The Child and saddled themselves with a tricky plot that runs aground; put another way, the vehicle for their moral ideas in this instance is a convoluted film whose narrative machinery simply seizes up. A key moment is omitted, and the filmmakers appear to believe that, as in cheesy TV cop shows of yesteryear, a tough guy can be easily incapacitated with a single blow to the head with a rock. On the one hand, it's good to see the Dardennes trying something new, something beyond their normal cast of working-class Belgian feckless ne'er-do-wells. On the other hand, it feels as if they don't really know this

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new territory very well—neither in terms of the novel characters they're using, or the physical move to Liege from Seraing, the industrial town in which all their previous films have been set—giving The Silence ofLorna a highly derivative feel. Throw an Italian mobster and a Russian mafioso into the mix, and the resulting stew feels very foreign indeed. As in L'Enfant, the Dardennes offer up a character capable of the most brutal act, in this case, murder, and have her undergo a transformation that is not genuinely credible. We raised some of these issues in our conversation in Toronto. Class society damages some people so much they are capable of anything. Someone prepared to kill another human being to open a snack bar is quite far-gone. Do such people exist? Of course. Are they likely to be moved by elemental human concerns as Lorna is, to be transformed because of the plight of another? This is a gross underestimation of the difficulties, as far as I am concerned. Luc Dardenne explained to me that he and his brother had heard a story about a drug addict in Brussels who was approached by the Albanian mafia to marry an Albanian prostitute in return for a large sum of money, so she could become a citizen. But this is not an insignificant difference. Lorna is not a prostitute—she's as modest and faithful as one can imagine, until she's driven to take desperate measures. There is an unresolved dualism in the Dardennes' films that weakens them artistically. The filmmakers create hardened or bitter characters and then present their startling metamorphoses outside of any objectively driven process, simply as the result of certain cumulative internal psychological processes. The films are not convincing, one feels, because the brothers have to introduce minor miracles to overcome their own essential skepticism. In another interview, for instance, Luc Dardenne said about Lorna, "How can a woman who doesn't believe in God believe everything is possible? Where does this crazy hope come from? She is strange, out of the ordinary. A fictional character always swims against the tide." Yes, in the world the Dardennes have created in their new film, where does this "crazy hope come from"? And what does this reference to a fictional character swimming "against the tide" signify if not a tacit admission that theirs is a contrivance? A political problem may very well lie at the heart of the artificial character of the Dardennes' stories. Undoubtedly, the filmmakers are disturbed by the dog-eat-dog mentality in the decaying industrial areas of Wallonia, the loss of solidarity and community. And so they should be. Now, added to that, there is the ruthless individualism of sections of the immigrant population, from eastern Europe in this case. However, a


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concrete investigation of the processes that have led to a cultural and moral decline and the rise of anti-social behavior would inevitably direct the Dardennes toward the parties, left tendencies and labor bureaucracies that have abandoned the Belgian working class to the tender mercies of globalized capital. In eastern Europe, the same issues would be posed in regard to the Stalinist regimes. But such an investigation is intellectually demanding and would also perhaps hit too close to home; the Dardennes come out of the left-radical milieu themselves. They take the line of least resistance and concentrate on the failings of the population, which is portrayed largely, as an inert, backward mass. However, still disturbed by the state of society, the Dardennes look to find a way of making change possible, but they now locate that possibility artificially, in largely mysterious ("crazy") individual psychological transformations. When I asked about the plausibility of Lorna's turnabout, Jean-Pierre Dardenne suggested, "That's the power of fiction. That's what interested us, to see how in our story we could give Lorna the ability to change." But fiction of this kind, to be convincing, needs to bean a close relation to a reality external to itself. Mass psychology is not individual psychology extended to the whole of society; it is a qualitatively specific system, with its own laws. The moral transformation of a society is not the sum total of individual changes. In the final analysis, as Marxists have long understood, the growing sense that something is terribly wrong and unjust with a society is a reflection of the fact that economic and social processes have undermined the existing order and that a solution, in the form of the reorganization of life on a higher social principle, now exists. The effort to work out a social psychology from the individual "outward" is doomed to failure. As is the effort to give people "the ability to change" based on such an approach. In the final analysis, only the movement of great social forces, relatively independent of the individual's consciousness, can explain shaip shifts in the moral and political climate of a society. The artist is not obliged to paint all that on his or hercanvas, but even the accurate representation of a detail of life, or a fleeting moment, requires that the artist have some sense of the relationship between the individual and the social whole. The Dardennes essentially argue in our interview that, "of course," big social problems require big social movements and big struggles, but that's not their concern in this film. That's another story. And, they assert, they don't let "extenuating circumstances" interfere with their artistic efforts. But what sort of humane approach leaves those out? What is Dreiser's An American

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Tragedyy if not an extended account of the socially rooted extenuating circumstances that make Clyde Griffiths' actions comprehensible? Lorna may be a poor immigrant, the Dardennes argue, but that doesn't absolve her of her anti-social behavior. Who would suggest that it does? Her situation doesn't excuse anything, nor does it explain her conduct fully. Human beings are responsible for what they do in the narrow sense, but if her conditions of emigration, exploitation and poverty (and the social order as a whole) are not, in the larger scheme of things, responsible for her actions, then what connection exists between the macro- and microcosmic spheres? Why portray the social conditions at all, if they are not an active element? Social contradictions and iniquities exist, the reasoning goes, but they are over there in the distance somewhere and they can't really explain why people act as they do. This helps account for the artistically unsatisfying character of the film. It is not an integral, whole piece. It falls into two parts that are never harmoniously brought together: in the background, the state of life in Liege, for immigrants in particular; in the foreground, Lorna's ethical dilemma. There is no necessary and inevitable connection between the two. The Dardennes themselves, in our conversation, rule that out ("extenuating circumstances" must not play a role). In the end, the filmmakers are reduced to moralizing about what individuals do and wagering on their capacity to listen to their better selves, especially if they are helped out by more enlightened souls, in this case, the filmmakers, offering the character "the ability to change." The emphasis is seriously wrong. Even the title indicates the difficulty. "The Silence of Lorna," as though it were all up to her. Her silence, her fault. This comes perilously close to middle class sermonizing, preaching virtue to the downtrodden. In any event, the Dardennes' films provoke debate and thought, and that is certainly worth something.

ARTICLES

SOLDIERS' STORIES: A NEW KIND OF WAR FILM, OR WORK AS A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (THE VILLAGE VOICE, 3-9 NOVEMBER

1999)

LESLI CAMHI

"What does the world of work demand? Just this: a place in society.,, Not a slogan from the barricades of May '68 in Paris, but from Lfege, in 1960. That year, this city in southern Belgium was a flashpoint in a general strike that paralyzed the nation, as workers and government forces clashed in warlike confrontations. Liege is the home of Jean-Pierre Dardenne; his brother Luc lives in Brussels, about an hour away. For the past twenty-five years they've made the industrial region around the Meuse River, where they were born, the focus of cinematic investigations—first in documentaries about its social history and, more recently, in two extraordinary features, La Promesse (1997) and Rosetta, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes International Film Festival this year. A straight line runs from their earliest work to thenlatest, for the strikers' demands from some forty years ago remain largely unanswered; in Rosetta the same needs fuel the heroine's frantic, obstinate search for work. "Employment today is like a game of musical chairs," says Jean-Pierre Dardenne. "There are seven chairs, and eight people. When the music stops, the person who can't find a seat is eliminated. So it is with work. The only way to find a job is to take someone else's. So when Rosetta sets out to look for work, it's as if she's going off to war. For her it's a matter of life or death. She thinks that if she doesn't find a place in society, she'll die, she'll simply cease to exist." The Dardenne brothers grew up in Seraing, a working-class town where daily life revolved around the sirens of steel mills and coal mines. "Our school was next to a factory," Jean-Pierre, who is forty-eight, remembers. "When the wind would blow in a certain direction, the courtyard would fill with red smoke from the steel furnaces, and we'd


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have to stop playing soccer, because we couldn't see. So that ambience was something we breathed in, literally." In the early '70s, Luc earned a degree in philosophy, while Jean-Pierre studied acting in Brussels. "I used to bring Jean-Pierre his laundry at school on Saturdays," the younger brother, now forty-five, recalls. "His professor, the French director Armand Gatti, worked a lot with nonprofessionals. One day, he said I could join them." Inspired by Gatti's experiments with video, the brothers worked for three months in a cement factory to earn money for a camera and sound equipment, which they quickly put to work in the service of a social vision. "We'd shoot strikes, and show the footage at union meetings," Jean-Pierre says. "Or we'd go into low-income housing projects and videotape people who'd done something with their lives, who'd been active in the Resistance or the labor movement. On Sundays, we'd find a place in the projects, a garage or an apartment, and we'd show the tapes. We were trying to create links between people through video." In the late 1970s, they produced the first of a dozen documentaries for Belgian television. "We said to ourselves, things happened in this country that nobody talks about," Jean-Pierre recalls. "There had been a Resistance movement against the Nazi occupation—nobody talked about it," Luc continues. "There had been a huge strike in 1960—same thing. We were motivated by the idea that we had to transmit this history to our generation. Well, with La Promesse and Rosetta, we said, enough of memory—we're going to take the people of today, and the things of the present." The bustling city of their childhood has changed. The steel mills stand empty and rusting; the coal mines are exhausted; downtown has been abandoned to recent immigrants and the people who exploit them. That landscape—a moral universe in disorder—is the setting of La Promesse, in which a young boy is forced to choose between his father, a ruthless black marketeer who traffics in immigrant labor, and his first inklings of conscience. Rosetta's geography is as tightly calculated as a battlefield. "We thought of it as a war film," Jean-Pierre explains. "The town is the front where she battles for a job. Then there's a kind of no-man's-land, where the bus lets her off. And when she crosses the highway, and goes through the forest, she enters the trailer park, the rear camp, where she eats, sleeps, and tends to the wounded." The latter includes her mother, a phantom figure with badly dyed hair, who prefers to drown her pride in alcohol.

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Soldiers' Stories

"There are 10,000 people living in campsites in Belgium," Luc explains, "who've lost their homes, and can't get into low-income housing. It's the last step before homelessness." Yet Rosetta transcends mere sociology. For Emilie Dequenne, it's a story about what it means to be human. "At the beginning, Rosetta is a very absolute, die-hard kind of person," says the actress. "She wants to break in and find her place in the fortress that is the world. She's so obsessed with that idea that she becomes a fortress herself. And one day, she realizes that she can no longer be alone. At that point, she becomes a human being." In Dequenne's visceral performance (for which she shared the prize for Best Actress at Cannes), Rosetta's character is revealed through repeated, unexplained gestures—like pulling on a pair of rubber boots—that are as tense and ritualized as a warrior's. The boots are meant to protect her from the mud that covers the campsite and, like her mother's despair, threatens to engulf her. From its handheld camerawork to its refusal to provide psychological interpretation, the film's storytelling is as naked and direct as Rosetta's fight for survival. "Rossellini called it 'the dry eye'—not too much pathos," Luc says, citing as reference points the Italian master's Germany Year Zero as well as Bresson's simplicity and the arid emotional terrain of Howard Hawks's Scarface. This lean, taut style is also a product of a lifelong conversation. "With age, we need to explain much less—so many things are simply understood between us. Like an old couple," Luc says. "Of course, as with old couples," Jean-Pierre adds with a laugh, "sometimes things end in murder."

Two BELGIAN BROTHERS' WORKING-CLASS HEROES (INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, 29 OCTOBER 2002)

JOAN DUPONT

The Dardenne brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre, live outside the main stellar systems, making movies like modest proposals, showing scenes of strife in the working world. It is a world without romance, gadgets, or glamour. Men of few words—even fewer in English—the Belgian brothers find themselves on the fast festival route, from Cannes to Toronto and New York, picking up awards on their way. "When you travel with a film, you put it behind you," says Jean-Pierre. "That's how we separate from it and get on with the next one," says Luc. The incorrigible Dardennes still speak with one voice, completing each other's sentences. Although Jean-Pierre, once an actor, is the elder, it is Luc, the philosophy student, who does the talking. Since their first success, with La Promesse, six years ago, the system has revolved in their favor. Today, audiences seem to have an appetite for what goes on in the real world, and the brothers' hard-hitting documentary approach is—at last—perceived as modern. In 1999, Rosetta, about a working girl who drops out of the system, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. This year, Olivier Gourmet won best actor there for Le Fils (The Son). But the brothers who function as an unusually compatible couple have been making movies since 1981, and it took years before their talent was noticed. "When we showed La Promesse to Cannes, we were at our wits' end," Luc recalls. "We were afraid of the reception because our last movie had been a disaster and if La Promesse hadn't worked, we would have stopped making movies." "Your work has to find an echo," echoes Jean-Pierre. "It's not about box office, it's about recognition. At one point, a film works, like a chemical mix, in this case, it was the theme: the father-son relationship, clandestine immigration, an African woman."

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Two Belgian Brothers' Working-Class Heroes

In La Promesse, Gourmet played a terrifying figure who initiates his son into a lawless world. In Le Fils, he plays a carpenter who trains young people. He has lost his own son and has to deal with a wild mute boy, just out of prison, his son's murderer. He swerves between wanting to hurt the boy and seeking to help him; the camera keeps pace with his violence and the agony of his indecision. "We tried to find a rhythm for the film, to build tension, that's why we have no music," Luc says. "We use those constant camera movements to track Olivier as he hovers on the edge of murder." The plot is built like an enigma, as the camera hugs the man closing in on the boy, cornering him with hard questions. And the story, as in their other films, has a moral core: Just as Rosetta almost let a friend drown, Olivier yanks himself away from the brink of murderous impulses. After Rosetta, in which Gourmet had a small part, the brothers promised him that one day, they would cast him in a big part. "We didn't have any idea what the theme would be; we just love to watch him work; he's a puzzle. And he carries the movie on his back." A bulky man who whittled himself down to play the part, Gourmet wears a watchful expression behind large glasses; he can look ominous. His body says it all. "We tell the story from the father's point of view and we called it Le Fils, but it's really the father's story: He's the one who doesn't kill because he can't both be a father and a man who transmits murder." Gourmet, whose father was a farmer and whose mother ran a small hotel, is himself a man of many trades, a carpenter, a fixer. He went to the Liege Conservatory where he met Jean-Pierre years later. "Olivier looked like an ordinary man, and that's what attracted us to him; he doesn't look like an actor." Weekends, Gourmet still goes to the family hotel to help out in the kitchen, and when Le Fils was shown locally in the city hall, he raised a toast saying, "It's a shame of course, for Jack Nicholson, that he didn't win the award, but, hey, for our town, it's terrific." The idea of Le Fils was inspired by the case of two Liverpool adolescents who kidnapped a small boy and killed him. "What does it mean to be a child who kills a child? What does it say about parents and society?" Luc asks. "Olivier is supposed to be teaching the boy carpentry and things a father would teach a son, so he's put himself in a hard place." Morgan Marinne, who plays the boy, had worked at various apprentice jobs. "You feel his life hasn't been very clear, and we liked something that made him strong and suspicious, with tiger eyes. He resisted us." With each film, the Dardennes' camera seems to move in closer, the pacing is more intense, the movements more frantic. "Our need to film that


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way came out of the material, but it mustn't become a formal device." Jean-Pierre agrees, "We have to be careful not to shut ourselves up in a system." Raised in Seraing, a coal-mining suburb of Lifcge, the brothers grew up without movies. "We don't have any kind of cinema memory; we got there late in life. In our village, every year there was a f§te and at the end, they gave us a pair of shoes and a ski jacket and showed us a movie. That was our first time." Their strict father was against entertainment of any kind; their mother, an operetta singer, gave them the desire for a less rigorous life. They were attracted to the serious social documentary process of the '70s. They met up with Armand Gatti, the French theater director who had made a stirring film on concentration camps. "We became Gatti's assistants, which meant all sorts of things, like keeping him company while he ate," Jean-Pierre recalled. "He told us to look into video, so we started by recording his work and the people he interviewed." "We made films in a rustic fashion, basic stuff, portraits, and showed them to the workers," Luc resumes. "Then we got an editing table and tried something different: a history of the workers' movement in our region. We discovered people who had been in the Resistance, or they had been independent thinkers, excluded from their union." They interviewed a local hero, a man who had edited a newspaper during a strike. Ten years later, they met him again, down and out, begging at the train station. "He had been a hero during the strike, and then failed at everything he did, but he was an extraordinary witness of our times. This is what nourishes us, the stories of these people." Only a few hours from Paris, Brussels and Li&ge, where the brothers live, seem far away. They have a hard time finding a kinship with French filmmakers. They admire Laurent Cantet, director of Resources humaines (Human Resources) and L'emploi du temps (Time Out). "We wanted to coproduce him because we like his kind of cinema." The French director Bruno Dumont, pf La Vie de Jesus (Life of Jesus) and L'Humanite (Humanity), seems to have something in common with the brothers' vision: They share a cold stark northern countryside, a landscape that is yet not void of Christian reflection and the notion of redemption. "There are things in common with our movies," LUG concedes. "Little dialogue, the way things emerge organically, and there's an obsessional way of unveiling the story. We're somewhat on the same turf, and have more in common with each other than with French cinema today, or, let's say, Paris cinema. But we don't film bodies the satne way and Dumont shows more sky than we do."

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Two Belgian Brothers' Working-Class Heroes

Their films of low horizons and worker heroes bear more resemblance, they think, to the world of Maurice Pialat. "He works with raw matter and we like his violence." They go for the simplicity of John Ford and the artistry of Kenji Mizoguchi, his "elliptical way of showing things." "In Le Fils, we wanted to film the gestures of a man transmitting his craft, without making a documentary on carpentry," Luc says. "There's tension and a sense of expectancy, you wonder what is coming next." The brothers find that the borders between documentary and feature film have become blurred and now, instead of being forever out of fashion, they are finally on their own terrain. "Today there's a cinema that listens to what is going on in the-world," Luc says, "and a generation that asks questions."

TIMBER!: CARPENTRY AND LE FILS (GUARDIAN UNLIMITED, 27 FEBRUARY 2003) GEOFFREY MACNAB

They're Belgian. And they've just made a film about carpentry. Interviewing the Dardenne brothers is like having a seminar with two smiling but rigorous university professors. Jean-Pierre (born in 1951) and Luc (1954) are tall, athletic-looking, silver-haired men in leather jackets. They have been making documentaries for years, but it's their feature films that have won them an international following. Inevitably, given that these films deal with unemployment, racism and urban alienation, the brothers have been pigeonholed as Benelux's answer to Ken Loach, a tag they ruefully accept. (Asked for their major influence, they joke "David Cronenberg" before expressing their admiration for Loach.) They take around three years per feature. "We see ourselves as cows," is the explanation. "We have to ruminate a lot." Their movies may be grueling, but they are made with such craftsmanship and intelligence that they never seem merely didactic. "There seems to exist again in the world a cinema that ten years ago was disappearing," suggests Luc, "a cinema that questions the world. This may sound pretentious, but these films become objects of exchange which help people to live better by the questions they ask." Jean-Pierre went to drama school; Luc studied philosophy at the University of Louvain. Since then they have been more, or less in step. In 1975, they launched their own production company, Derives." Between 1974 and 1977, they shot a series of video movies about urban problems. They made their feature debut in 1986 with Falsch, but La Promesse (1996)—the story of Igor, a teenaged boy whose racist father makes money by exploiting illegal foreign workers—marked their breakthrough. And they won the Palme d'Or for Rosetta (1999), about an alienated teenager living with her alcoholic mother in a trailer park. Now comes Le Fils, a focused, intense tale about Olivier, a woebegone carpenter (Olivier Gourmet) who takes on as an apprentice a sixteen-yearold lad, Francis (Morgan Marinne), responsible for the death of his own small son five years before. The film takes the brothers' minimalist

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Carpentry and Le Fils

approach to a new extreme. There is very little dialogue and no music. Nothing is stated explicitly. We know Olivier is divorced, but only very slowly do we learn the details of his family tragedy. "Sometimes less is more," Jean-Pierre comments of their elliptical storytelling style. "We try to find the essentials." The emphasis, he explains, is on looks and glances: on hands, faces, the way Francis catches Olivier's eye. Their original screenplay contained far more dialogue and detail, but that, it seems, was purely for the benefit of the investors. "They need something to read. They need to be able to imagine what the film would be like," Jean-Pierre says. As ever, they made Le Fils far away from the studios. "We like the limitations of real locations and try to adapt to them as much as possible." Like Loach, they relish working with non-professionals and have an innate distrust of showy performances. None the less, actors, in their films regularly win prizes. Emilie Dequenne received the best actress award in Cannes in 1999 for her performance as Rosetta, while Gourmet followed suit with this year's best-actor prize. Ask which brother does what on set and both look mildly baffled. "We do the same thing," Jean-Pierre says. "There is no division of labor." They admit, however, that when they're working one brother remains with the technicians and actors while the other watches on the video monitor. Fiction gives them opportunities that they simply didn't have in their documentary days. "In La Promesse, for example, there's a scene in which we film a man who dies. We said to ourselves that if we'd been making a documentary, we could never have filmed that shot—in documentary, if someone is dying in front of you, you stop filming and try to help them. But in fiction, we can allow them to die." What's startling about Le Fils is how buttoned up and repressed all the characters are. Olivier, we infer, feels enormous grief and resentment and has a capacity for violence. As played by Gourmet (a regular in their films), he is a dour, truculent presence who looks as if he might snap at the slightest provocation, but somehow keeps his emotions in check. "We were trying to create a state of tension. Both characters are trapped within it and you expect that they have to break out and that there will be some sort of explosion. For Olivier, the question is whether to kill or not to kill and he is constantly rehearsing the question in his mind. This potential murder is constantly on the very edge of the film frame," says Jean-Pierre. The choice of carpentry as Olivier's profession was no accident. As Luc explains, it's a profession in which measurement is crucial. "We always wanted to make this a film in which the camera would constantly


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be measuring the distance between Olivier and Francis, whether they're in the car or in the street, or Olivier is spying on Francis." When Le Fils was premiered in Cannes, certain critics complained that there was no explanation for the behavior of the characters. Predictably, both brothers give such criticisms short shrift. Their task, as they see it, is to state the characters' problems rather than to solve them. Le Fils, like La Promesse and Rosetta, is structured like a parable. The ironies are always obvious. Like Abraham with Isaac, Olivier is at once a father-figure to Francis, and potentially his killer. He begins to see the boy as a substitute for the son he lost, but he knows the boy was responsible for his son's death. He is drawn to the boy, but terrified of him. That terror has as much to do with his own capacity for violenpe as with the boy himself. There are some striking similarities between the film and last year's U.S. indie hit, In the Bedroom. Both movies are about grieving parents struggling to come to terms with the fact that the person responsible for killing their child is living in their midst. In the American film, the father takes a bloody revenge, but the Dardennes are too subtle to resort to a final-reel, vigilante-style shoot-out. "Maybe that's the difference between American and European cinema," Jean-Pierre muses. "In American cinema, to achieve catharsis you k i l l . . . and then you say you're sorry."

AUTEURIST BROTHERS WHO WORK LIKE COPS {THE NEW YORK TIMES, 18 MAY 2005) MANOHLADARGIS

When the Belgian director Jean-Pierre Dardenne was fifteen years old, one of his passions, unsurprisingly, was football, specifically the great team Royal Standard de Liege (Standard for short). One day, Dardenne, who is now fifty-four and still lives near Liege, watched an interview on television with a star of the team, Roger Claessen. Dardenne related how the interviewer breathlessly told Claessen that he had a fabulous life ornamented with hundreds of girls. But what else, wondered the interviewer, did he do with his time? "I have a pillow book," said Claessen. "Dostoyevsky." This greatly impressed the young Dardenne, who soon found a book of Dostoyevsky to use as his own pillow book. Every other student at his school did the same. By reading the Russian author, says the filmmaker, "we all hoped we'd become Roger Claessen." Dardenne*s younger brother, Luc, began reading Dostoyevsky as well. He counts Crime and Punishment as one of his favorites, although he quickly adds that Woody Allen's film Crimes and Misdemeanors is better yet. As it happens, Crime and Punishment significantly informs the Dardennes' latest masterful work, L'Enfant (The Child), a harrowing story about a petty thief of uncertain morality named Bruno, his girlfriend, Sonia, and their newborn son, Jimmy. Dardenne recalled his introduction to Dostoyevsky here while sitting in the suite housing Celluloid Dreams, the sales company handling The Child. Several hours earlier the film had been greeted with cheers and applause after its first press screening. Critics who have lustily booed other competition films this year exited The Child extolling its greatness. The Child is the fifth of the Dardennes' six fiction features to show at Cannes. The brothers began working in film making documentaries, concentrating on working-class matters, making the move to fiction storytelling in the late 1980s. In 1996, they made a sensationally well-


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received breakthrough film, La Promesse (The Promise), a moral fable delivered in the key of neo-realism about a teenager who disobeys his criminal father to help an illegal immigrant and her child. The film played in one of the festival's parallel programs, Directors' Fortnight. All the features the brothers have since directed have been shown in competition, including Rosetta, which won the Palme d'Or and an award for best actress in 1999. The Child stars Jdremie Renier, the teenager from The Promise. Renier, now twenty-four, will become a father soon; his co-star in the new film, a wisp of a girl named Deborah Francois, is seventeen and still in high school. After she watched the film for the first time, says Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Frangois expressed surprise that she could appear so childish onscreen. "We are all children," says Jean-Pierre Dardenne. "Everyone is a child in the film." The brothers share the writing and directing credits on all their fiction films. "There's always one of us in the middle of the crew with the camera and one is with the monitor," Jean-Pierre Dardenne said. "We work together and together we develop things with the actors before the crew gets on the set. One will put himself in the place of the camera and the other will say this is a good idea, that's a good idea. It comes about organically. There are always two points of view on what's happening. It's like two policemen who are alternating interrogations." They dig to the core of the issue, he added with a flourish, like policemen trying to provoke "a criminal to confess a crime." Asked if they operate like good cop and bad cop, the Dardennes laughed; they insisted that they were both bad cops. In another hour or so, the two men would finally be able to sit down at a table with their wives, friends and colleagues, rather than journalists, and eat dinner. But the night would not end after the final digestif. At 1:30 in the morning, the Dardennes would enter the Lumi&re, the largest of the festival's theaters, to perform a technical check with their producer and the film's director of photography and sound mixer. Only after they had vetted sound and image would they call it a night. The next day, the Dardennes would walk the red carpet on their way to the first public screening of The Child, and no doubt the audience would cheer.

WE'RE THE SAME: ONE PERSON, FOUR EYES (GUARDIAN UNLIMITED, 9 FEBRUARY 2006) XAN BROOKS

How did two Belgian "gloom-mongers" become the toast of film festivals all over the world? ., To the world's press, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are cinema's "brothers grim," professional gloom-mongers who trade in harsh, socialrealist studies of the Belgian underclass. Ironically, though, those resolutely unglamorous films have made them regular fixtures on the highglitz festival circuit. One moment the duo are lifting the lid on the fate of illegal immigrants (La Promesse), teenaged poverty (Rosetta) or the blackmarket trade in adoption (L'Enfant). The next, it seems, they are parading before the flashbulbs in tuxedos as they pick up the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival. The life of a Dardenne brother can be a strange, split existence. The pair regard their jet-set lifestyle with detached humor. In a burble of conversation, they explain they flew into London yesterday and are off again tonight. "We are like Mick Jagger and Brian Jones," says JeanPierre with a wave of his cigar, knowing full well that few filmmakers are less emblematic of rock 'n' roll decadence than these two. Even as they flop on the sofa in perfect unison, the siblings present a seamlessly united front. They share joint credits on all their films, giving the impression that the Dardennes work in a kind of mystical tandem. Even in terms of physical appearance there is little to distinguish them. Luc is marginally rounder and more impish looking than his angular elder brother. Aside from that, you might struggle to tell them apart. "We are the same: one person, four eyes," says Jean-Pierre. "We have to be, otherwise we could not make the same film. There is no secret." "I can understand how it goes against the romantic concept of this almighty creator working in isolation," Luc admits. "But cinema is never the work of just one person, and we are not even the first to do it this way. There have been others, like the Taviani brothers, who have found


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common ground in something that they are passionate about. Now, you might think that if you have discussion and agreement and compromise then there is a danger that the passion goes out of it. But that is not the case. We have managed to maintain a relationship while still keeping the passion." It transpires that there is also a pair of Dardenne sisters. "But they do not make films together," Luc says. "One works in the theatre. The other is a nurse." The Dardennes' latest film, L'Enfant {The Child), plays out in their favored location of Seraing, a depressed steel town in the Wallonie region of Belgium. It follows the fortunes of Bruno, a petty thief who sells his infant son, struggles to make amends and then finds himself hopelessly in hock to the gangsters who arranged the transaction. It is a heartfelt, harrowing film, colored from top to tail by the influence of the late, great Robert Bresson. If Rosetta (1999) was the brothers' homage to Bresson's 1966 classic Mouchette (a stark, soulful portrait of a teenaged outcast), then UEnfant is the Dardennes' version of Pickpocket, right down to the redemptive prison visit at the end. Jean-Pierre, fifty-four, and Luc, fifty-one, started out as documentary makers, funding their early work with shifts in the local cement factory. Throughout the 1970s they made low-budget TV films about strikes and unemployment, Polish exiles, and underground radio stations. It is tempting to view their feature work as a direct descendant of these documentaries. They share the same crusading social zeal, the same lowkey narratives and handheld, vdrit6 style. Except that it turns out that the Dardennes have turned against their former love. "I am coming out of the closet," declares Jean-Pierre. "Documentary pisses me off." They nurse a particular contempt for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, the film that preceded UEnfant as the Palme d'Or winner at Cannes. "Oh, I wouldn't even call it a documentary, that's just a bad film," sniffs Luc. "Maybe only Americans can appreciate it, because they are more susceptible to propaganda. In Europe we're more inured to it, whether it be from Nazi or communist propaganda films. So I just hated that film when it did things like making the soldier's mother break down in tears. That kind of manipulation doesn't work so well in Europe." What they learned from making their own documentaries, they say, is that the truth is hard to pin down. Reality won't fit inside a neat dramatic pigeonhole, people are essentially unknowable. That's why they have no truck with critics who have variously read their work as religious allegories or tub-thumping political statements. "It tells us more about the people who say it than it does about us," says Jean-Pierre. "This might

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One Person, Four Eyes

sound a bit general, but what we are interested in is simply to explore the possibilities of the human being." None the less, it can be no coincidence that the Dardennes are so drawn to the margins of society. Perhaps they feel that the human being is more interesting when he or she is in crisis, stripped of the safety net of job, income and home. "Maybe," says Luc. "Maybe life is more present, more important, in those circumstances." Jean-Pierre picks up the baton. "We do like filming those kinds of people, we always have. And because we are so attached to the town of Seraing we have been able to see the way it has changed through the years. It used to be a city with a lot of solidarity, and where the unions were strong. Then we saw the appearance of people who were suddenly living on the streets, and a sense of loneliness that wasn't there before. But we are not so much interested in where those people came from as where they are going. How are they going to survive? How are they going to behave? Are they going to adopt an altruistic approach or are they only going to think of their own survival?" He pauses to think of an example. "When you are living on the margins and there is one bottle of water between the three of you and you have to make that bottle last a week, what do you do? Do you drink it alone? Do you hide it? Do you make the decision to sacrifice one of the three? So the economic question becomes a social and a human question. That's what interests us." And sometimes, it seems, the questions the Dardennes ask have a wider social effect. It has been reported that Rosetta made such an impact in its homeland that the Belgian parliament promptly introduced "the Rosetta law" to safeguard the rights of teenaged workers. "No, that law already existed, it just hadn't been voted through yet," counters JeanPierre. "The truth is always less interesting than the fiction." The Dardennes' latest film reunites them with Jer&nie Renier, who plays the central role of Bruno. They last worked together on La Promesse {The Promise): at that time, Renier was an untried fifteen-year-old on only his second acting job. Since then he has gone on to take leading roles in films such as The Pornographer, The War in Paris, and Brotherhood of the Wolf Having provided Renier with his springboard to success, the Dardennes thought twice about using him again. "We were a little bit worried because he has done so many films now, and we were concerned that directors might have given him a lot of technical skills," says Luc. "That happens a lot with experienced actors. They close down and protect themselves, and then all you get are the same mannerisms, the same tricks, the same character. So we were scared of


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that, and we told him, 'You have to be like you were in The Promise. You have to be innocent again. It has to be as if you have never acted in your life before.'" It is this quest for innocence, for purity, that is at the heart of the Dardennes' working methods. They have established a lofty international reputation by keeping their nose to the ground. Avoiding the lure of established stars and hefty budgets, the brothers ferret out human stories from their local terrain and turn them over to the world at large. But there is a paradox here, and it shows up every time they slip into their festival tuxedos. Do they fear that they might be drifting too far from the margins? Do they worry about becoming victims of their own success? The brothers laugh at the notion. "We are not Spielberg," chortles Jean-Pierre. "Spielberg is successful, not us." It is important to realize what it is like in Belgium, Luc tells me kindly. If I understood that, I would realize how silly the question is. "Filmmakers in Belgium are seen as arts and crafts makers. It is a small country. There is not really a film industry there at all." "It is not like Paris," says Jean-Pierre. "It is not like Paris at all." He makes the French capital sound as distant as Hollywood or Oz; some mythical kingdom they would never dream of visiting.

TENDING L 'ENFANT: THE DARDENNE BROTHERS RETURN WITH ANOTHER PALME D'OR WINNER (FILM JOURNAL INTERNATIONAL, 1 MARCH 2006)

RICHARD PORTON

For directors who are now the subject of sober analyses in film journals—not to mention the two-time winners of the top prize awarded by the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d'Or, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (known to all and sundry as the Dardenne Brothers) are refreshingly unpretentious. When Film Journal International spoke to the fiftysomething brothers at the 2005 New York Festival shortly before the U.S. premiere of their second Palme d'Or winner, VEnfant (The Child), they were in a typically upbeat mood. Despite their films' frequently bleak concerns, the Dardennes possess a playful, even impish sense of humor. Above all, they convey an almost childlike enthusiasm for the nuts and bolts offilmmaking;during our conversation, they recounted the evolution of many of the key scenes in VEnfant with great relish. In an era when international co-productions have given birth to impersonal movies sneeringly referred to as "Europuddings," the Dardennes, who have conceived and shot all of their major features in the Belgian industrial city of Seraing, are the cinematic equivalents of small craftsmen quietly resisting corporate mediocrity. Known for its steel industry and gritty working-class ambience, Seraing is the polar opposite of the tourist vision of Belgium as a country where the main preoccupations are ingesting fine beer and chocolates while admiring the paintings of the Old Masters. Jean-Pierre in fact agreed during our conservation that he "couldn't conceive" making afilmin, say, Brussels— let alone outside of Belgium. Since the brothers have such an intimate knowledge of Seraing, location scouting, an important step in their creative process, is second nature to them. Luc insists "we always have specific locations in mind before shooting—even if those locations might


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change when we start filming." They both agree, with more than a modicum of pride, that they are essentially regional filmmakers. Even though the Dardennes honed their filmmaking skills by producing intensely political documentaries (which remain virtually unknown outside Belgium) during the late 1970s and 1980s, the feature films that made their reputation are less concerned with grandiose political statements than with intimate explorations of individuals grappling with moral quandaries. A typical Dardenne protagonist is usually a supremely flawed individual who eventually makes a small leap of faith than enables him or her to retain a certain amount of dignity in the midst of squalor and dishonesty. Igor, for example, the teenaged protagonist of La Promesse (played brilliantly by the young J£r6mie Renier), initially seems destined to remain as corrupt as his slimy father. Yet, at a pivotal moment, Igor is able to make a stand and condemn his father's sordid exploitation of immigrant labor. The title character of the 1999 Palme d'Or winner Rosetta (embodied by the young Emilie Dequenne in a breakthrough performance) is a sullen, singularly unappealing young woman scarred by her mother's alcoholism and a grueling work regime. Despite having either ignored or betrayed everyone who tries to help her, Rosetta retains the audience's empathy because of her sheer determination to endure adversity without capitulating to inertia or suicide. Bruno, the central character of Sony Pictures Classics' UEnfant, is perhaps the most repellent figure in the Dardennes' rogues' gallery—a petty thief who resorts to selling his and his girlfriend Sonia's baby for a paltry amount of cash. It's eminently clear, however, that the brothers view their central character's misdeeds with equal measures of bemusement and compassion. Like other Dardenne anti-heroes and antiheroines, Bruno eventually turns over a new leaf and Luc emphasizes that "we were mainly interested in Bruno's moral evolution . . . the film is about the birth of his conscience." In addition, Jean-Pierre obviously finds it difficult to conceal a sneaking admiration for this seeming lowlife. Between chuckles, he remarks with gentle irony that Bruno "is not a bad thief—but perhaps not one with a great career ahead of him. He's smart enough to use small kids to help him with his thefts—since in Belgium at least these young accomplices can't be arrested or jailed." When asked about the contradiction that their early films celebrated workers' movements while the slug-like Bruno believes that "work is a fool's game," Jean-Pierre gamely replies, "Being a thief is a kind of work—it's not easy and in fact involves a lot of effort!" Luc also speculates that a scene during the film's culminating robbery, which features Bruno

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Tending L'Enfant

painstakingly straightening out a metal bar, could be termed an inadvertent tribute to Seraing's steel industry! Given the requirements of the Dardennes' character-driven films, it's no surprise that they're particularly eloquent on the casting process and their close working relationship with actors. In true neorealist fashion, L'Enfant features both seasoned professionals and non-professionals in their first roles. Although Deborah Francois, who plays the long-suffering Sonia, has never acted in films before, her unaffected performance meshes seamlessly with the contributions of veterans Renier (whose indolent Bruno is worlds away from the inquisitive Igor he played in La Promesse) and Olivier Gourmet (the Cannes award-winning star of their previous film, The Son). According to Luc, "An actress such as Deborah, who hasn't worked in films before, can only help our process." He observes that he and his brother were in fact a "little nervous" about working with Jeremie Renier again. They remembered him as the carefree kid who starred in La Promesse and wondered if he could pull off the much different role of Bruno. As it turned out, Renier inhabits the role with complete ease and his dissolute Bruno bears little resemblance to the much more innocent character he portrayed many years earlier. Many critics have noted the affinities between the Dardennes' use of non-professionals—and spare, stripped-down style—and the films of the late Robert Bresson. The debt the brothers owe to Bresson is most evident in L'Enfant's conclusion: a moving finale in which Sonia visits the repentant Bruno in jail and both experience a moment of redemptive (although apparently secular) grace. Asked about the parallels between the conclusion of LlEnfant and Pickpocket, Jean-Luc seems both eager to register his respect for Bresson's legacy and concerned about accusations that their films might be considered pale imitations of the French director's masterpieces. He insists, "It's true that we've seen Pickpocket and admire it. But we didn't realize that there were parallels between that film and ours until we completed it. In fact, we originally had a much less happy ending in mind and thought of killing off Bruno. But we eventually thought this wasn't satisfactory and decided to spare him." Jean-Pierre's musings make it clear that the brothers' films undergo a subtle evolution from pre-production to the completed work. A genuine desire to share the intricacies of the creative process underlined Luc's decision to publish working notes as well as the shooting scripts of The Son and UEnfant in a volume (not yet available in English) entitled Au dos de nos images: 1991-2005. For Luc, the shooting scripts and notes are a supplement to the visceral experience of viewing the films and "provide the public with a very good idea of our working method and how our


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initial concepts changed during the course of filming." It is this spirit of openness and generosity that characterizes the Dardennes' cinematic vision. Oblivious to the cynicism and bad faith that mar so many contemporary films, they remain unapologetically optimistic.

FILMMAKERS ON FILM: THE SECRET OF THE DARDENNE BROTHERS' PALME D'OR SUCCESS (THE INDEPENDENT, 17 MARCH 2006) SHEILA JOHNSTONE

Ken Loach's Raining Stones might seem a self-evident choice for JeanPierre and Luc Dardenne to contribute to this series. Like Loach, the writer-director siblings spotlight people on the very margins of society, showing their lives with passion and compassion. Also like him, they mix actors with non-professionals and employ a plain, naturalist aesthetic. But in fact they spent a lot of time and trouble agonizing over which film to talk about. Scorsese's Gangs of New York, Chaplin's Modern Times, Kieslowski's White, Bresson's A Man Condemned, and various titles by Rossellini and Maurice Pialat were considered and rejected. Their range of candidates reveals them to be eclectic in their tastes, keenly interested in film (they have seen much of Loach's other work) and anxious to do full justice to their choice. "You have to take care when talking about someone else's work," says Luc, the younger of the two. "You mustn't massacre it." They are thoughtful and meticulous, sometimes agreeing with each other, sometimes interrupting to refine a point, or to contest it. When filming together, one imagines, the brothers must collaborate just like this. They have been making films for more than twenty years. But they did not burst on the international scene the Cannes Film Festival in 1999. Tucked away in that year's competition was a film that didn't get a starstudded evening gala. Rosetta was unveiled in the graveyard slot, at 4 p.m. on the last Saturday afternoon, when many people had long since left town. The program described it as the tale of a young woman living in a trailer with her alcoholic mother, struggling to hold on to her dead-end job at a waffle stand. So, it came as quite a shock when the film's directors, the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, were named as the winners of the Palme d'Or, and their young star Emily Dequenne got Best Actress.


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Their next film, The Son, is set in the same gray, run-down steel town in eastern Belgium—Seraing—where all of their films are set and where they grew up. In it, a joiner confronts a terrible memory from his past when he finds that his strange new apprentice is the youth who killed his son. The brothers proceed to analyze Raining Stones—which they saw in the cinema when it was released a decade ago—in enormous detail. It is set in Lancashire's Catholic community, and its protagonist is an unemployed man determined to buy his daughter a brand new dress for her first communion. When various money-making scams fall through, he turns to a vicious loan shark to raise the cash. "He wants to give his daughter pleasure," Jean-Pierre says. "To do something good, he risks everything and sets something in motion which he can't control. And he will have to react to that. It will open his eyes." Luc: "There are several great moments. One is when the man's best friend goes home broke. His daughter comes back with some money and we understand she has been dealing drugs. He sits in his armchair and cries: he has lost his status, his morale. It's terrible for him, as the head of the family. Loach shows human beings with a very strong sense of dignity, and how the working class has been destroyed from within, by poverty and unemployment." Jean-Pierre: "The other scene we've often talked about, my brother and I, is between the mother and daughter. The film spends a lot of time with them, as they bake cakes for a party. We see all the little gestures, the little girl cutting the pastry. There's a certain light which creates an atmosphere of tenderness. It's filmed simply, like a documentary; we don't feel the director's presence. Things seem to happen naturally, as if they were taken from life." That same precise attention to the small acts of day-to-day existence can be observed in the Dardennes' own films—in, for instance, Rosetta's heroic struggle to move a gas canister so heavy she can barely lift it, or The Son's long scenes in which the joiner demonstrates his craft to his pupils. "And then," Jean-Pierre continues, "suddenly barbarism breaks in—the loan shark who comes to collect his money and destroy everything." Luc: "Obviously, there's a narrative structure. But quickly you start following individual characters, who aren't just excuses to advance the plot." Jean-Pierre: "Loach makes people individuals, not just mouthpieces for a point of view."

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The Secret of the Dardenne Brothers' Palme d'Or Success

So enthusiastic do the brothers become that one wonders if they have any reservations about the film. "There's only one thing I don't like," Luc says, and his brother chimes in to pre-empt the end of the sentence: "The music." Luc: "There's this constant background of music. We never use music. We don't think it's useful in our kind of film." Although many critics are mightily impressed by the power of the Dardennes' vision, some viewers find it austere and forbidding, in both the choice of setting and the severe no-frills manner of shooting it. Certainly, while much of Loach's work has a rich vein of humor, and while the Dardennes in person are a jolly duo, their films remain in a profoundly serious register. They shrug and laugh loudly in unison. "Ah yes, we know. But we're not much good at comedy." Last year, at Cannes, with their latest film, The Child, the Dardennes nonetheless joined that very small, select band of directors who have won the film festival's most prestigious award, the Palme d'Or, twice. Made on tiny budgets, their work hovers on the margins of mainstream society, in the world of the have-nots. But, far from looking drab, their cinema is exciting and full of suspense: an urgent, fast-moving camera races after the characters, stalking them through their complicated lives and sweeping the viewer along in a process of total immersion. And this is no agitprop. After Rosetta, legislation was passed in Belgium protecting the rights of young, low-paid workers, but "it was pure chance," Jean-Pierre insists. "There was already a bill going through, and the minister took advantage of our award to call it the Rosetta Law. But we never intended to get laws changed." Luc adds: "Of course, we always hope our films will speak to people, disturb them, but we never hoped to change the world." The Child centers on Sonia, a young woman who has just had a baby, and her boyfriend Bruno, a petty criminal living on the streets. Bruno is carefree (some would say, shamefully irresponsible) and money burns a hole in his pocket. Short of cash, he impulsively sells his son to childtraffickers, and is puzzled when this sends Sonia into a state of shock. After all, he points out, they can always make another one. The film began, Jean-Pierre explains, with their glimpsing a young woman pushing a pram down the street in a weird, manic manner. "We saw her several days in a row, and wondered about her. Then, a year later, when we started work on our next film, we suddenly started talking about her again, I don't know why. We thought it would be interesting to devise a story about her, and somehow it turned into the story of a boy who can't accept fatherhood."


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Animated and genial, Luc, fifty-one, and Jean-Pierre, fifty-four, give interviews with good grace, but they make no secret about being uncomfortable at their red-carpet status. And as with other fraternal filmmaking duos—the Coen or the Quay brothers—the interviewer can feel slightly intimidated, simply by virtue of being outnumbered. This feeling is undoubtedly shared by their actors. J€r&nie Renier, who plays Bruno, made his screen debut at fourteen in the Dardennes' 1996 film The Promise, as a youth helping his father smuggle illegal immigrants into Belgium. Since then—like many of the brothers' other discoveries—he has developed a successful acting career, but he admits to being daunted by the prospect of collaborating with the Dardennes again. "We told him he'd be working under the same conditions as everyone else—no en-suite bathroom, no girlfriend, no driver, no pets," Luc says, pounding the table. "That's important, in order to create therightatmosphere." Deborah Frangois, the elfin eighteen-year-old who plays Sonia, the young mother, was recruited by the brothers' usual method: radio and newspaper ads inviting local girls to send in their r£sum6s. She was one of 200 to be auditioned. After three goes, she landed the role, but, "they never explain anything about the character's psychology," she says. "You mustn't ask them about that. So you never know if they're happy with what you're doing. But when they're not satisfied, they tell you. They say, 'You must feel things in your belly'."

THE DARDENNES {FILMJ0URNEY.ORG, 23 MARCH 2006)

DOUG CUMMINGS

The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne received their second best picture award at the Cannes Film Festival last year for writing and directing The Child (L'Enfant), a repeat honor bestowed upon only a handful of filmmakers, But their lean and focused works have barely graced U.S. screens. For the last fifteen years the Dardennes have captivated international audiences with dramas highlighting the ethical conundrums of working class life: La Promesse (1996) details the troubled relationship between an adolescent and his father who traffics in illegal immigrants; Rosetta (1999) conveys the obsessive lengths to which a teenaged girl demands a job, a home, and a normal life;- The Son (2002) suggests the way a carpenter's enigmatic thoughts revolve around the devastating act of a young apprentice. These films are available on video, even if the filmmakers' early documentaries and features are not, inspiring career retrospectives of their work in London, Toronto, and other cities this year. The Dardennes' rigorously handheld camerawork and selective framing merge with physically intense acting to evoke a cinematic tradition of realism infused with philosophical and spiritual depth; they've cited Roberto Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero (1947) as their model film, and critics have compared The Child to Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959). Despite being at the forefront of world cinema, the Dardennes are disarmingly soft-spoken and relaxed in person. I'm chatting with them at the Toronto International Film Festival about The Child and their creative process. "Every morning that we shoot," Jean-Pierre says, "we rehearse on location with the actors. We don't rehearse the dialogue, only the movements and rhythm. And we decide where we're going to place the camera; often it's dependent on how the actors have moved and where they've stopped. We need to see this happening in front of us in order to plan it."


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Their quasi-documentary style also recalls Denmark's Dogme 95 movement, but the Dardennes' passions predate it: "Long discussion with Jean-Pierre about the way we will continue to make films," reads an entry from 1992 in, Luc's recently published diary. "One thing is certain: small budget and simplicity everywhere (story, d&or, costumes, lighting, crew, actors)." The plot of The Child fits the mold. Like most Dardenne films, it's set in their industrial hometown of Seraing. A twenty-year-old hoodlum named Bruno (J£r£mie Renier) attempts to live with his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Sonia (Deborah Frangois), and their newborn child, Jimmy. But Bruno is ill-equipped to be a father and attempts to sell his child on the black market; the film details the havoc that ensues. "We like filming actors' bodies," Luc observes, emphasizing the way people walk and move and conduct their trades rather than deliver dramatic soliloquies. Bruno and Sonia physically wrestle with one another, expressing myriad emotions: love, playfulness, anger, defensiveness. Francois shines in her performance, at times projecting warmth and compassion but fluidly switching to ferocity. The Dardennes appreciate the value of mystery in art and conversation, and seem more comfortable elucidating their methods than their meanings. I ask them about the repeated imagery of the Meuse River in The Child— perhaps it reflects Bruno's desire for movement or transformation? "That's something you might see in it," Luc answers, "but that's not how we worked. If I remember correctly, the reason we chose to work with the Meuse was because of a scene when the stroller would be washed, which we ultimately cut." Yet after describing their pragmatic series of decisions, he tentatively concedes, "You could see the river as being life or birth." It's not that the Dardennes dismiss interpretation; they simply know that less explanation can be more meaningful to viewers who will engage and absorb on their own. It's an approach with artistic precedent—let the work speak for itself—but also one closely linked to the writings of Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), a major inspiration to the filmmakers. (Luc studied philosophy; Jean-Pierre studied drama.) Levinas stressed face-to-face encounters; at first unknowable and autonomous— even threatening—the Other compels response. In The Child, Bruno comes face-to-face with his son, someone he initially regards as a potential source of income. The Dardennes convey the father-son disharmony in the way Bruno physically interacts with his child. "In the very first scene, when Sonia comes with the child to introduce him, Bruno doesn't even pick up the child, but answers the phone," Jean-Pierre says. "Later," Luc continues, "he holds the baby

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The Dardennes

against his chest so he doesn't have to look at him. During one of our takes, when Jeremie looked at the child, there was an emotional build-up, and we decided no, it can't be." Since the Dardennes are co-directors, they've also developed a method of face-to-face production. "One of us stays on the set with the actors and technicians and the other brother goes behind the video monitor," JeanPierre explains. "Once we've done the first take, we both review the monitor because there might need to be changes based on what we've seen, and then maybe one or two scenes later we'll switch roles. Because our takes are quite long, and there is a lot of movement within each scene, the guy behind the monitor may see the rhythm better than the guy on the set—but maybe not the acting." This accounts for the astonishing immediacy of a Dardenne film. The visible tension of the filmmaker in close proximity to the actor is recorded directly by the camera. Luc elaborates, "If it is possible, one of us has to stay on the set, because it adds tension. It's important for the actors. They know that you're there watching. They work under your gaze. If there's a strong trust with the actors, then it's very important for them to have you physically there." Cinephiles themselves, the Dardennes cite F. W. Murnau's classic Sunrise (1927) as an inspiration for The Child. "It's the story of a man who wants to murder his wife, so they go off on a boat together, but he decides not to kill her and spares her. And we thought that it was indeed possible, based on that movie, to have a long segment in the film that deals with Sonia and Bruno coming back together." Indeed, while The Child shares many elements of the Dardenne universe—work as an expression of life, personal disconnection, ethical dilemmas—its characters seem warmer. "The film is more tender," JeanPierre notes, "maybe like water moving. It has quite supple or mobile characters, more like membranes, unlike Rosetta or The Son, which had characters with armor. We wanted the characters in The Child to vibrate more. Maybe because we shot so many scenes close to the water it helped. Bruno is a bit like an insect darting here and there. He lives very much in the present without thinking of the future. And yet the child requires a lot; responsibility, protecting, caring for another human being." Fortunately, The Child will be distributed in U.S. theaters in March of 2006, offering moviegoers the chance to encounter the Dardennes' unique and profoundly moving methods for themselves.

Luc AND JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE {BOSTON PHOENIX, MAY 2006) GERALD PEARY

At last year's Cannes Film Festival, where UEnfant {The Child) won the Palme d'Or jury prize, the Belgian brother filmmakers, Luc and JeanPierre Dardenne, talked excitedly about their film. Therein, a young street hoodlum, Bruno (J&emie Renier), casually sells off his newborn, to the horror of the mother, his teenager girlfriend, Sonia (Deborah Francois). Just who is the titular baby? "The film is not about paternity," said Jean-Pierre Dardenne. "It's about a character who is nor really there, a lightweight character. A bit like a child. He's never present. Sometime, he has to decide to be present." Jean-Pierre continued: "During our previous film, The Son, we were shooting several days in the city of Seraing. We saw a young woman going up and down the street with a pram, pushing it as if she wanted to get rid of the child inside. This image haunted us, and allowed us to invent a person: the possible father." Luc Dardenne: "Children have been abandoned forever, but selling children this way is perhaps a recent phenomenon. Bruno lives in the immediate moment. A child, Jimmy, comes along who lives in real time. Does Bruno's love for Sonia suffice to lead him to see and hear his child? We decided that love isn't enough." How do the Dardennes move to the actual filming? "I write the first version of the screenplay," said Luc. "I send it to my brother, he makes corrections, then we work together. When we get to the sixth version, we send it to a producer." The casting as Bruno of J6r6mie Renier, who starred in their earlier La Promessel "We found him by telephone. We didn't think of him immediately," admitted Jean-Pierre. Deborah Francois as Sonia? "We met her doing a screen test," said Luc. "We tried a lot of young girls; she was the best." 'They put an advertisement in local papers," Frangois interjected. "My brother read it, I sent off a photograph. Why not?"

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Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne

"Being a little criminal myself," Renier piped in, "the part wasn't very difficult. I just walked about the streets of Seraing. As for Bruno's mobile, I use one all the time." "We did a lot of rehearsals," said Jean-Pierre. "We asked J£rdmie to be free from August [in 2004J and for Deborah to cut short her vacation. We rehearsed on location until mid-September. It was one day that we felt that the characters were 'there.' They had a certain freedom, and we could work with this freedom." The Dardenne brothers readily admit the influence on their film of the minimalist cinema of Robert Bresson. They acknowledge that Sonia is borrowed from the similarly named character in Crime and Punishment. "Yes, Raskolnikov and Sonia!" said Jean-Pierre. "And Bresson is big for us! Impressive!" "We love Bresson's films. It's a fact that they are important to us," said Luc. "He's lean. He's dry. He's pure." The casting of little Jimmy? "We always used a real baby," said Luc, "but you can only use one for so many hours. So we had twenty-three babies, for all the scenes except the dangerous one on the scooter, when we had a doll from London which we nicknamed Jimmy Crash." So how could Bruno be so insensitive to this child? "I don't know if he even realized Sonia was pregnant, and that's his baby," said Francois. "Bruno is unaware that he needs to visit his girlfriend in the hospital when she goes into labor," said Renier. "Still, the character speaks to me. I understand his recklessness, the violence of his acts. He doesn't realize he can hurt. He lives to sleep, eat, get money." "The story is a mirror of our times," said Luc Dardenne. "It's difficult to find a center of gravity today, not just for Bruno. For everybody."

THE BROTHERS BELIEVE IN TOUGH LOVE {THE AGE, 26 AUGUST 2006) PHILIPPA HAWKER

It was a pram, says Jean-Pierre Dardenne. A young woman with a pram. This was where the film L'Enfant began. The filmmaker and his brother, Luc, both noticed the woman, in the midst of making their previous movie, Le Fils (The Son). What they had seen in passing, and what had struck them, he says, speaking through an interpreter, was that she was handling the pram very roughly. It looked as if she was fleeing from the child inside it, rather than pushing it. I had gone to Brussels to interview the Dardenne brothers who, for several decades, have been quietly carving out a significant place in world cinema. They make their films, however, in the same place they always have: the industrial landscape of the city of Seraing, where they were born, has been the location for their documentaries and then their features. Without fanfare, they have twice won the Palme d'Or—the best film award at Cannes—with movies whose visceral intensity and emotional impact is inversely related to the size of their budgets. In 1999, the award went to Rosetta, their tale of a young girl's desperate attempts to find a job. Six years later, UEnfant (The Child)—the movie that began with the image of a pram—won again. The Dardennes—often referred to as "les frZres" or "the brothers"— are Jean-Pierre, fifty-five, and Luc, fifty-two. They have collaborated for thirty years on film projects, although they started out in different disciplines—Luc studied philosophy, Jean-Pierre drama. Like the vivid, visceral, profoundly bleak and gripping Rosetta, the characters of L'Enfant are on the margins of society, living hand-to-mouth. The film looks raw and provisional, and has an almost documentary realism, yet there's also a chase sequence as unnervingly tense as a thriller. UEnfant began, the brothers say, with that image of an unknown young woman. But atfirst,it was the story of a girl looking for a father for her child. The working title changed to The Force of Love: this underwent several changes before the brothers settled on the final one.

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The Brothers Believe in Tough Love

Titles, they say, help them with the movement of the characters, and with creating a frame for the film. In a recent book called Au dos de nos images {On the Back of Our Images), which comprises extracts from a journal kept over two decades, Luc notes the development of details large and small in the midst of reflections on films, philosophy, books, current events and travel. In the end, the brothers found their characters, their title, and the heart of their film. There is a young woman, Sonia, who gives birth, and a young man, Bruno, who is the father, but who seems unable to take responsibility for his child, and comes up with the idea—horrifying, yet to him perfectly logical—of selling it. Jeremie Renier, who plays the young man, had worked with the brothers before in their breakthrough feature La Promesse {The Promise). Renier went on to make a career for himself as an actor. The brothers did not have him in mind for Bruno to begin with. "We'd seen him since, but not for work, and we asked ourselves, 'I wonder if he can still laugh the way he did in La PromesseV" Deborah Francois, who played Sonia, had not acted before. The Dardenne brothers often use non-professional cast members, and have an established way of auditioning them. "We put an advertisement in the paper, and ask for photos and a contact number. We choose some people to see from the photos, then slowly narrow it down." The brothers chose Francois because of a feeling that she hadn't given them everything—that there was still something in reserve. A few days earlier, I had spoken to Frangois about making L'Enfant. She had no idea what they had seen in her: in fact, she said, Jean-Pierre believed that you should never tell an actor why they have been selected. Although part of the audition process involved performing scenes from the film, she didn't realize until she was cast that her character had just given birth. She wasn't prepared, either, she says, speaking through an interpreter, for what working with the brothers entailed, and she didn't find it easy. "Some days were very difficult. But if I had gone to them with a problem, they would have said, 'You work it out, you're the actor.' To which I would have said, 'I'm not an actor, I'm a high school student.'" Frangois says she is a middle-class girl and that she didn't have much in common with the character of Sonia. "They wanted to toughen me up, and so they literally pushed me around to make me tougher and harder," she says. "It was helpful for the character, but it was difficult for me. I come from a pretty sheltered background and this was a really new experience. But afterwards, when I


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saw the film, I realized it had been necessary." She adds, in English, "It was like breaking a bit of Deborah to let Sonia out." I asked the brothers about the "toughening up" of Deborah, and they laugh. "When you're young, it's hard for you to shed your image of yourself." It wasn't that she was middle class. She was, says Jean-Pierre, a princess. To act, "you have to be willing to smash the image you have of yourself. We weren't going to try to make her into a working-class girl. But we made her do sport for two hours every day, we made her come to a hotel, leave her parents, break up with her boyfriend—so that she would quit Deborah." The brothers' methods are a combination of painstaking preparation and deliberate flexibility. They share the tasks between them, and after a lifetime of working together, they seem to be in a robust creative accord. They rehearse a good deal, before and during the shoot: in the latter case, they are not so much thinking about the text, but more about the rhythm and the shot, and getting therightlevels of energy between characters. For example, "We might say, we're going to do the whole lot, but without speaking," Jean-Pierre says. The brothers can also incorporate events on the fly, such as a scene in which one of the extras spontaneously asks Bruno about the baby. And because they shoot in sequence, they can make specific changes. Bruno, for example, begins the film wearing a sharp leather hat, which they decided looked a bit too self-conscious. "We needed to get rid of it," says Jean-Pierre. But they also felt they needed to show how this happened, so they wrote a scene showing him selling the hat as part of a deal—"it seemed in character that he would". Wardrobe is something the brothers work out in detail—but it is always on their terms. "When an actor says that an outfit suits them, you immediately become wary, whether they are a professional or not," says Jean-Pierre. "With an actor, they're thinking about their image—with a non-professional, they're thinking about how they'll look to their friends. It means they are hanging on to who they are rather than becoming their character."

SILENCE NOT QUITE GOLDEN {THE AGE, 25 JULY 2008) STEPHANIE BUNBURY

The Dardenne brothers insist that they don't have a problem with money. "Money is fine!" says Luc, grinning. "Fine, fine!" But it isn't for nothing, surely, that their searing new film The Silence of Lorna opens with a shot of Lorna, an Albanian illegal up to her ears in scams, riffling through the paltry supply of Euros in her wallet. In Lorna's life, everything starts with the money. Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne began their filmmaking career thirty years ago, when they began shooting videos of workers telling their own stories on their local housing estate in Seraing, the small industrial town in Belgium where they still live. Although they made a transition to fictional films in the late 1980s, their subject essentially did not change. The poor, the morally battered, the lowlife and sad cases who have fallen into the cracks of life: these are the Dardennes' people, rendered with simplicity but an emotional force rarely generated on film. "We like these people, even if they do terrible things," says JeanPierre. "Maybe this is because we see them less. Maybe by approaching the margins we can see better what's in the center. Although when we start afilm,we don't really think about what milieu or social class we are going to set it in; we think about individuals and their situations. Often our films include a death, and there is a moral question of how to deal with that." The Dardennes' breakthrough on the festival circuit came in 1996 with The Promise, about a teenaged boy who disobeys his criminal father to help an illegal immigrant, which screened to a rapturous reception in Cannes. In 1999, Rosetta, their intense study of a woman vainly looking for a job, won not only the Palme d'Or—the festival's top prize—but a best actress award for the unknown amateur they had cast in the lead, Emilie Dequenne. In 2005 they won the Palme d'Or for the second time with The Child, a film about a petty thief who, having unintentionally fathered a baby, thinks he will save the situation for himself, his beloved girlfriend and perhaps even the child himself by selling him. The brothers' ability to make this hapless lad sympathetic, even as he tries to do


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something so horrifying that at the time this viewer felt unable to breathe, represents an act of extraordinary sympathy. By the middle of this year's festival in Cannes—before Laurent Cantet's winning film The Class had been unveiled—it seemed the Dardennes might win the Palme for an unprecedented third time. The Silence of Lorna is, once again, a powerful story from the lower depths. Lorna's own small, fixed ambition is to get together enough money to open a snack bar with her boyfriend, now working his way around Europe in every job he can find off the books. Like many illegal immigrants, she is being handled by compatriot people-traffickers who have arranged a marriage for her with a young and desperate junkie, Claudy, that will allow her to gain Belgian citizenship. Once she has her papers, she will make another, much more remunerative marriage to a Russian criminal. Claudy had better divorce her. If he won't, he will probably die of an overdose; in fact, they'll make sure he does. Lorna says nothing. She has to look after herself. "When you're poor, you can't plan your life," Luc Dardenne said some years ago, talking about Rosetta. "You just react to what life throws at you." The Silence of Lorna, he says, was inspired by street stories of junkies who had married for money and ended up dead. "We were thinking about this situation and had the idea of exploring the woman's position in that contract. We were thinking about what it would be like to be caught in that dilemma, between wanting to pursue the dream of a better life and the fact that it would entail someone dying." Jean-Pierre Dardenne was fifteen when he read that the hero of his local football team, Roger Claessen, was a keen reader of Dostoyevsky. Like every other boy at his school, he started reading Crime and Punishment; the younger Luc followed suit. Clearly it is still one of their key texts, although they also acknowledge a biblical influence on their parables of love, death, and betrayal. When they made their film The Son, they have said, they often talked about the story of Abraham and Isaac, a parable of paternal love and duty. "Abraham doesn't have to kill Isaac," said Luc at the time. "And that's the foundation of humanity." They are not believers, they say now. "But religion is a big part of the human story," says Luc. "We read these stories and find things in them that go beyond religious connotations. Whoever wrote the Ten Commandments clearly understood something fundamental about human beings. It would be wrong to ignore that just because you didn't believe in God." Thou shalt not kill* Thou shalt not covet. Like the Dardennes, those old words go right to the heart of things.

THE DARDENNE BROTHERS AND THE SILENCE OF LORN A {TIME OUT LONDON, 24 NOVEMBER 2008) DAVE CALHOUN

We already know what the Dardenne brothers are good at: miniaturist, humane and realist dramas that play out in the small-town arena of their home country, Belgium. With award-winning films such as The Child, Rosetta, and The Son, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have developed their own, unfussy and deceptively straightforward language which involves the close examination of fictional, usually struggling or impoverished individuals who reveal themselves through small events with major repercussions. It's by mastering this sympathetic but inquiring approach to portraying anonymous but significant lives that the brothers, who started out in the 1970s as documentary-makers, have twice won the Palme d'Or in Cannes,firstfor Rosetta in 1999 and then for The Child in 2005. Maybe it's this familiarity with the texture and soul of their work that explains the quiet reaction afforded, the Dardennes' latest, The Silence of Lorna, when it premiered at Cannes earlier this year. The response from critics was largely one of positive indifference to this story of a young Albanian immigrant (Lorna, played by Kosovan-Albanian actress Arta Dobroshi) in the Belgian town of Liege, who is forced to re-examine her ruthless attitude to life. But while the approach is recognizable, there's nothing familiar about the story, and Lorna is a character who lends an international dimension to the Dardennes' ongoing studies at the edge of Belgian society. As with all the Dardennes' films, we dive right into the bustle of Lorna's life: she is sharing a flat with Claudy (Jeremie Renier), with whom she has a hostile, businesslike relationship. It's soon clear that Claudy is a junky and the pair are married—but only so that Lorna can gain Belgian citizenship. It also emerges that Lorna has agreed with the criminals who brokered the marriage that Claudy will soon be murdered. This may all sound like the bare bones of a mafia movie that operates at the bounds of credulity, yet by focusing on Lorna and the glimmers of


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humanity that she gradually reveals—a revelation that centers on a possible pregnancy—the Dardennes offer a compelling and credible study of the grey area that lies between desperation and responsibility. "There's room for the audience to care about Claudy and also to be intrigued by mysterious Lorna," suggests Jean-Pierre Dardenne when we meet to talk about the film. "We gain empathy with her as we go along." In all the Dardennes' films, regional, working-class lives are portrayed with an inquiring immediacy and neutral gaze: these Belgian brothers with a social conscience never demand that we side with or—worst of all—feel sorry for those they depict, many of whom are unlikeable in the first place. Rather, they ask us to study and understand their characters and their essential humanity. For instance, in The Child we meet a young man, played by the brothers' regular collaborator Renier, who reacts to poverty by trying to sell his baby; while in The Son, Olivier Gourmet, another regular, is a carpenter who takes a strange interest in a boy he believes to have been involved in the death of his own young son. On top of a keen eye for characters, the brothers have a great grip on the power of storytelling: they are able to turn the most miserable of situations into a thriller, perhaps, or a mystery. Just think of the policechase sequence in The Child in which Renier speeds off on a moped to hide in the waters of a river. The Dardennes know how to offer heartfelt social precision while keeping an audience on its toes. It's the same in their latest, in which the hard facts of European migration and inequality lie behind Lorna's compelling story. Was it these issues that kickstarted the film? "No," says Jean-Pierre straightaway. "The idea came from a woman we met whose brother was a junky and who had been approached by the Albanian mafia about an arranged marriage. His sister worked with street people and advised him not to do it because she'd heard of junkies who had entered into such arrangements and had been found dead. "We wanted to look at the woman in this situation, who is also in a difficult place and at the same time has a dream that means more than anything to her. She tries to justify her actions—that Claudy's not worth anything, he's just a junky. But she's confronted with a dilemma, and will she realize that her dream is not worth as much as a life?" It's Lorna's unknowability that makes the film so thought-provoking. It's also what influences the film's visual style, which is less close-up and frenetic than its predecessor, The Child, "We wanted to watch Lorna, watch Lorna, watch Lorna," Luc says. "You have to watch her because she is mysterious, and to understand her

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The Dardenne Brothers and The Silence ofLorna

we had to distance ourselves. That's why the camera is further out than usual and moves much less." I suggest that Lorna, despite her behavior, is essentially a victim—of inequality, of border controls, of the need to survive. Compared with Claudy, her husband with a heroin addiction, is she not equally desperate and alone? "Yes, that's true," says Jean-Pierre, before stressing that he wanted to portray someone more complex than a mere victim or villain. "Yet, at the same time, she accepts the whole agreement to marry Claudy and that he would die later on. She's complicit." He's right: Lorna is no victim—some of her decisions preclude that— but neither is she irredeemable. She's an intriguing creation, an enigma, and fully deserves a place in the canon of characters created by the Dardennes.

REALITY BITES (SOCIALIST REVIEW, DECEMBER 2008)

JIMWOLFREYS

An adolescent boy is asked to look after the family of an immigrant worker in whose death he has been implicated. A young woman wages a furious lone struggle to forge an existence. A couple's life is blown apart when their son is offered for sale. These stories, told by the Dardenne brothers since the mid-1990s, turn around the dilemmas faced by individuals in marginal social situations, forced to comply with the ruthless logic of the market or find another way to live. The film that first brought Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne an international audience was The Promise in 1996. Rosetta, which received the Palme d'Or at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, and The Child, which won it in 2005, confirmed their place among the most respected directors in world cinema. Their latest film, The Silence of Lorna, deals with a young Albanian woman who arrives in Belgium and finds herself involved with a criminal gang engaged in the buying and selling of marriages as part of an underground trade in citizenship. This trade will require her tacit complicity in someone's death. The Silence ofLorna is partly about the specific predicament of newly arrived immigrants to Western Europe, and the limited range of possibilities open to them. At the heart of the story, however, is the preoccupation that dominates most of the brothers' films—the scrutiny of an individual at a moment of crisis that will shape their life forever. Rosetta, for example, turns around the central character's search for friendship and for work and her decision to sacrifice one for the other. Claustrophobically centered on the astonishing performance by Emilie Dequenne in the title role, the brothers have described it as a "war film."

Opinion These are not morality tales, with the Dardennes sitting in judgment on the choices made by their characters. "A film is not a courtroom," says

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Jean-Pierre. "If we start to judge our characters there is no space for the viewer to form an opinion." As Luc points out, "Lorna is socially fragile. If you or I want to do something, and have to get a loan from the bank to do it, we can. She can't. She's fragile in the sense that she cannot live like you or me. Because of her social situation she is ready to do things that we would not, because we have no need to. These situations happen to people like her perhaps more than to those living in material comfort. This leads her to have to accept or refuse the death of someone. Nothing can authorize her to do this. The spectator might think, 'Given her situation, we can understand.' But in this case no." Hemmed in by constraints, the Dardennes' characters are stripped down to their most basic elements and forced to dredge up from within the resources required to survive. Yet the brothers' films are more than explorations of human instincts. Shaping and constraining the motivations of their characters is the brutal, impersonal web of the market. "We like to lead our characters into situations where they become human beings," Luc continues, "where they discover that life has no price, contrary to what they thought. Lorna lives with the idea all the time that life has a price, money for this in exchange for that. And then here is something that escapes the exchange that governs all our behavior today." The brothers started out making documentary films. "We did a lot of portraits of people in working class areas. People told us about their lives, about times when they had fought for more justice, in their factory, their area, their life. And we showed these films, these little portraits, on a Sunday or a Saturday, in a cafe, in a garage, a room below a church, different places. Then we made documentaries that were more linked to the history of the labor movement. These were more collective subjects, for example, strikes or the resistance against the Nazis." Since fiction offered more scope to explore situations, they began making feature films. Asked about the focus of their cinema, the brothers once noted that when films have a working class subject matter they are labeled "social cinema," whereas films with bourgeois characters are referred to as "psychological dramas." In recent years, however, there has been a resurgence of films dealing with working class life. "It's true that in the 1980s we didn't think this type of cinema was going to come back," Jean-Pierre remarks. "Perhaps in the past it was too ideological, trying to convince the viewer of its point of view and that it held the solution. There was an ideologically marked political cinema that made propaganda which wanted to affirm a viewpoint and claim that the only solution was the revolution."


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Untrained Actors Their own films avoid both overt politics and commercialism. "The profession will look for recognized actors. This is an important dimension. We try to say something new, more 'real*. We don't go via the figure of the actor to interpret it. We go directly to the thing in question. It's like we want to re-appropriate the world. We'd had enough of things that just made the machine turn over. We wanted to do something else, to have direct access to something, with less technical mediation. These are also cheaper films, made with fewer means, fewer well-known actors." This method, giving scope for mostly untrained actors to feel their way around a role, will be familiar to those who know the films of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. Other similarities can be found in the choice of nondescript, mundane locations and in the straightforward lack of sentimentality with which working class life is portrayed. Images abound in Dardenne films of characters picked out against the blank monotone of concrete bridges and roads and the whirr of motorway traffic. Recurring themes include the importance of work, or its absence, and an unflinching focus on dehumanization and the scope for resistance to it. What do they have to say about the political implications of their films? "What interests me is not all these political, ideological things, but the individual," argues Luc. "Not to give categories or recipes or the solution but to ask, 'What is a human being?'; to lead it into extreme situations; to try to undress the person and ask 'Why did he do this or that?'; to try to go into situations where the individual will have to ask, 'Do I act to save this person or do I think of myself?' "In a social situation, the market, where everyone is put into competition with everyone else—in a context where people are in permanent rivalry and organized like that by society and the economy— how is someone like Rosetta going to be able to love someone when the situation asks her to consider him as her enemy, her rival? How am I going to be able to love my rival and get beyond that? If not—will I kill him, make him fall? That's what interests us. "They are tragedies of existence. To live am I going to have to kill? Am I going to be reduced to an animal state? Am I going to have to forget my sympathy for others? Our characters try to find this humanity, or in any case not to lose it." The Dardenne brothers dramatize this struggle to remain human by placing the individual lives depicted, and the predicaments that animate them, at the heart of all their films, rather than the tricks of plot or technique. Their pared-down, uncluttered style and the frequently

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spellbinding performances they elicit from their actors make their cinema compelling, often moving and sometimes hard to watch. One of the preoccupations of the Dardenne films is the possibility of individual dilemmas finding resolution through some form of solidarity. More often than not this involves some kind of affiliation with other isolated individuals, rather than a sense of belonging to a wider community. Some will see the lack of a broader canvas of class solidarity as a weakness in films like The Silence of Loma, but what kind of weakness is this? The lack of political solutions means that there are no consolations on offer here, beyond simple human defiance in the face of the trauma inflicted on individuals by the system, Many may therefore dispute Jean-Pierre's view that "Our films are more optimistic than reality." Few directors today are capable of depicting the human cost of capitalism's brutality with the simple force and eloquence of the Dardenne brothers. The Silence of Loma matches the considerable achievements of their previous films. It tells, moreover, the story of a young woman who, in the words of the film's press release, "has every reason to be desperate but who continues to believe that everything is possible." This is an outlook that socialists everywhere should be able to identify with.

INTERVIEWS

TAKING THE MEASURE OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE DARDENNE BROTHERS (CINEASTE, FALL 2003) JOAN AND DENNIS WEST

A number of artistic and thematic traits link the Dardennes' La Promesse and Rosetta and provide a connection to the brothers' next feature, the recently released The Son. The brothers use a handheld camera that spends much of its time literally running behind the principal characters, who are so often in motion. The stories focus on working-class families and examine such questions as the relationships between generations and how work or lack of it influences a person's identity. These tales are minimalist, but they broach a density of ethical and moral questions that the filmmakers leave partially unresolved in the scenes of confrontation that end the films. The thinking viewer is left to imagine the characters' future. The Son begins as a mystery: why is Olivier so upset when a new student (who remains concealed from the audience for some time) arrives at the special trade school where he teaches carpentry? At first, he refuses to take the student; then he begins to follow him around the school, spying on him; and then suddenly changes his mind and allows the youth into his class. It is eventually revealed that five years ago this boy killed Olivier's son during a petty robbery and that this incident destroyed the protagonist's life. He has remained mired in grief without ever being able to recover and get on with life. The filmmakers use this situation as a springboard into an intricate examination of identity and what it means to be a father. With the death of his child, Olivier lost his identity as a father; and with the divorce that followed, he is no longer a husband. He has essentially substituted his designation as a craftsperson for what used to be his private identity as an individual. When the boy Francis appears, Olivier the carpenter/childless father must begin to take several measures—of this adolescent (who


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remains unaware until the end of his connection to Olivier), but of himself as well. The protagonist is caught in a dilemma: will he take revenge on this youth who in a single moment robbed him of his identity by murdering his son; or will he accept the role the boy's presence implies, that of becoming his teacher and mentor and, in effect, his surrogate father? Even though the boy's repeated requests for information constantly call Olivier back into his role of educator at particularly tense moments, the question hovers to the very end of the film—will Olivier the carpenter destroy or rebuild? Will his bequest to this surrogate child/apprentice be death or a useful trade and the chance to grow up? It is difficult to imagine The Son without the stellar presence of lead actor Olivier Gourmet, an opinion upheld by the 2002 Cannes jury, who recognized his performance with the Best Actor award. Gourmet has been a regular in the Dardennes' films. He created Roger, the unscrupulous and ultimately pitiable father in La Promesse; and had a smaller part in Rosetta as one of the girl's employers. In The Son, it is the anxious physicality of his body moving through long takes and the manner in which his face occasionally registers painful flickers of subterranean emotion that allow viewers to plumb the depths of Olivier's silent existence as well as his moral quandary. The filmmakers discussed The Son and related topics last November during the 46th Regus London Film Festival. Cineaste: The relationship between parents and children seems to be at the heart of your films—La Promesse, Rosetta, and now The Son. Why? Luc Dardenne: It was the father who interested us the most. What is a father? What does it mean to be a father? Of course, for there to be a father there has to be a son, or a daughter. In La Promesse, the father, Roger, is outside the law—he is illegal, he traffics in immigrants; he takes up space in the unemployment line; he lies so that he can cut in front of people. He lets a man die and pulls his son Igor into the scheme, making him an accessory. He treats his son as if he were an accomplice, a member of the same gang. But he does not show his son the rules. He is not teaching him how to grow up, to become a man. He is teaching him to become a crook and simply a kind of friend, an associate. Murder, however, is not what a father is supposed to teach. The father—well the parents, really, because there is also obviously the mother—are the ones who say to a child, "Do not kill." In La Promesse, it is actually because of Roger that Igor is able to find another 'parent' and thus to free himself from the coercive relationship with his father. And it is

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a woman, Assita the foreigner, who is instrumental in accomplishing this change. Because of her Igor discovers guilt. He comes to regret having participated in a murder with his father and learns that not everything is permitted. Assita assumes the role of the father, the adult who says, "No. Not that. This, yes, but not that. Right and wrong are different, you cannot confuse them." La Promesse was the moral trajectory of a boy. The same is true in The Son. Olivier is haunted by the murder of his son by this boy, Francis. He feels somehow that it is legitimate to want to avenge oneself; what becomes illegitimate is finding satisfaction in it. How will Olivier withstand the action of not avenging himself? He has become a kind of father for Francis—even though he is the father of the child who died. He has transformed his own son into Francis. Can he teach, bequeath, his trade to this boy? Certainly, the greatest lesson Olivier gives the teenager is not killing him. That is what can save this kid—teaching him that murder is an act that only perpetuates itself from generation to generation. Perhaps this is the reason why Francis approaches Olivier at the end, because Olivier did not kill him. It is not in order to ask forgiveness. Olivier does not say he forgives him. It is more as if the boy is thinking, "He didn't kill me. Normally he would have. But he didn't." That is the lesson the boy learns. Jean-Pierre Dardenne: This is a story about transmission. LD: Yes, about what one gives to the next generation. We do not wish to get carried away with accusations against adults, against parents; but, as La Promesse suggests, we feel that these days it is as if we adults no longer want to die to allow the generation coming after us to live. In order to educate someone, you have to know how to die so that he or she can live; so that, simply put, they can take your place. We adults want to be immortal, we want not to die. Somehow it is as if, when all is said and done, we have this desire to eat our children, like the Greek god, Cronos. In short, we have nothing to say to our children anymore unless it is, "Hey, go play, get out of our hair! We like you. We give you birthday parties. We do everything you want, but we have absolutely nothing to say to you. We have nothing to pass on to you." That is a bit of what we felt and what we attempted to show, how adults were trying to be adolescents and not fathers, not mothers—just buddies. Cineaste: A question about The Son: generally speaking, films that explore the theme of forgiveness in any serious manner are not common in


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the history of cinema. How was it that you decided to develop a project around this topic? LD: Actually, our idea was not to write a scenario about pardon but rather about the interdiction against murder, and about desire as well. Obviously, if an act is forbidden, the desire to commit it must also exist—otherwise the act would not be forbidden. It was Olivier who attracted us. We asked ourselves what a human being is and came to the definition that certainly a human being is an individual who succeeds in not killing. Because killing is a human possibility. We wanted to see how we could push Olivier to the point of killing this adolescent and then have him not do it. How someone could remain human in such circumstances—that is what interested us. Olivier is no angel. If the boy were to say, "Yes, I regret what I did," Olivier would have become a real bastard if he just simply killed him. But suppose that the boy gets down on his knees, cries, asks forgiveness? Olivier might say, "Well, OK, fine—goodbye." However, this kid does not do that. He is not conscious of what he did; he even seems to think it was a matter of small importance. This provokes Olivier. So even though he asks himself why not teach the boy his craft, why not help this kid as he has others, we have to ask ourselves if Olivier did not, in his heart, unconsciously wish to avenge himself after all. And then he finds himself faced with the possibility of committing murder. I think that when Olivier almost kills Francis, but then gets up, he is ashamed because he almost became like the boy. He almost became a murderer, too. Killing, then, is a human possibility. It is easy. Well, difficult too, because you leave traces; you have to hide the body. That part is complicated; the killing is easy. Olivier realizes that he was almost caught in a repetition. For us the film is about how to get out of this repetition. Cineaste: Memory seems to be a central theme in The Son. The father has too many recollections and the boy practically none. LD:Yes. JPD: Yes, and you could say that Francis's body seems to remember. He is not well and has to take medications in order to sleep. You could also say that the entire journey Olivier makes in thefilmis tofreehimself from these memories. Life returns a bit at the end of the film and begins to reestablish its prerogatives. Olivier is a man so caught up in his memories that they have become a prison for him. This is not so in the case of his ex-

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wife. She has not forgotten, but she has begun to live again. Not Olivier. In spite of his involvement helping his students, teaching them a trade, he continues to be obsessed by his memories. They are the only thing that interests him. Why did he decide to teach in that kind of school—a school where he is likely to meet someone like Francis? If he chose to teach there it is because one day he said to himself, perhaps unconsciously, that he was going to meet his son's murderer. Cineaste: So when Olivier forces Francis to admit that he had killed a child, this is not necessarily meant as an act of charity towards the youth? Although, even if Olivier is acting out of his own interests, such a verbal admission is still, nonetheless, a charitable act that will free Francis and allow him to take up his life again and to grow up. JPD: Of course. It represents a way out for both of them. But a way out does not mean forgetting—it means being able to continue to live. You can go on living without forgetting. Cineaste: The sense of Olivier as a carpenter is very strong in your film. Why did you choose to give him this particular profession? LD: In fact, in our first drafts we made Olivier a cook because we wanted something alive—preparing food, cooking, nourishing—to contrast with the presence of death in the story. But then we got a little scared of the knives because that was becoming a bit symbolic. As soon as Olivier would have gone to pick up a knife and with the audience's knowledge that the boy had killed—the effect would have been dreadful! The idea of a carpenter came from the fact that carpenters are always measuring. Once we had decided on a carpenter the scenario was easy to do because we knew what woodworkers are, how skillful they are, how they wear overalls with a special pocket for their folding ruler, how they use a pencil to mark. And woodworking as a choice was interesting, too, because carpentry shops really exist in these schools for social rehabilitation. Most significantly we chose carpentry as a trade for Olivier because in the end—if you consider the film in terms of a purely cinematographic sense of form—you have a man and a boy, and between them a murder that is of special significance to Olivier. How will they be able to approach each other? They are closed up in a car, for example. How will we be able to calculate, to measure the distance between these two bodies? We have that night scene where Francis measures the distance between his foot and Olivier's. And when the moment comes for them to touch each other, will


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it be to forgive or to kill? Thinking about carpentry really allowed us to understand what we were trying to do in this film. Cineaste: In The Son there seems to be the suggestion that, beyond physical constructions, Olivier is also bedeviled by building problems of a more metaphysical nature, such as the challenge he has faced for five years to reconstruct a meaningful life for himself after the death of his son. Olivier appears to come to the conclusion, perhaps not consciously, that Francis is salvageable building material in the sense that the youth is capable of building a life as a responsible adult. Are there hints here of religious allegory? Might your film be a kind of morality play for the modern world? LD: Certainly when we set out to make this film we were aware that Christ was the son of a carpenter; and, therefore, that his father must have taught him a little of the trade. And that Christ died on a wooden cross. However, that was not our point of departure. I can understand how a Christian might say he or she sees the story as being about forgiveness. Why not? We, however, did not take the pardon all the way to its conclusion because we saw the main problem as being Olivier himself. At the end of the film, the protagonist does not kill the boy, whom he has forcibly restrained; later, after he has been released, Francis then approaches Olivier. Olivier is now able to teach the lad his trade. These actions might be understood as a kind of forgiveness by some people; but Olivier does not say, "I forgive you" to the boy, and the boy does not say, "I ask your pardon." To have a scene of forgiveness, it would have been necessary for the boy to ask for it. And there is the question we obviously asked ourselves—can Olivier grant forgiveness in his son's stead? No. We did think that Olivier's being able to teach his trade was not really such an insignificant decision. Perhaps in twenty years, when the boy will be a thirty-something-year-old man, he will write Olivier a letter thanking him for not having killed him. At that point he will understand fully all that he does not understand now. Cineaste: Why are there so many silences and so little dialogue in your films? JPD: In fact, The Son is afilmabout the difficulty of speaking: Olivier has difficulty saying, "It was my son you killed," and Francis has difficulty saying what he had done. We are more interested in trying to give meaning to a scene by the way we film the relations between the characters' bodies

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and what gestures a character makes—how he passes a cup to someone else, how he pours coffee into his cup. This is more interesting than presenting actions as pretexts for talking. Words come afterwards, when you cannot do anything else. In general I think there is too much talking in movies; it is an easy thing to do. But why clutter up a film with chattering? Cineaste: Given the emphasis you place on characters' gestures, do you use any special techniques working with your actors to get them to express what you had in mind? LD: On the set we do not speak to the actor about why his or her character does this or that. No psychological explanations on why a character acts a certain way. Certainly actors have their own opinions; they make their own films in their heads. On the occasions when an actor tries to speak to us about such opinions, we always try to contradict him in order to keep him slightly off-balance. What we do with the actors is also very physical. The day filming begins we do not feel obliged to do things exactly the way they were rehearsed; we pretend that we are starting over from zero so that we can rediscover things that we did before. The instructions we give the actors are above all physical. We start working without the cameraman—just the actors and my brother and me. We walk them through the blocking, first one then the other, trying several different versions. They say but do not act their lines. We do not tell them what the tone of their lines should be; we just say that we will see once the camera is rolling. At this point there is no cameraman, no sound engineer, no lighting. Then we set up all the camera movements exactly and the rhythm of the shot, which is usually a long take. Doing it this way allows us the ability to modify the actors' movements or any small details. Then we begin and the actors really say the dialog for the first time. If a line is not delivered as we would like it, we do not say, "No, you should say it this way." It is rather, "Not like that, hold back." We ask for less, less, less, more neutral, more blank. We try to comment in a way that is negative and physical so that the actors themselves can bring something to the process. Cineaste: It strikes us that your characters run a lot. They always seem to be hurrying, and your camera is always following them from behind. JPD: Well, since I can never be a viewer in the same sense that you are, I see things from a different angle; and, personally, I have another impression. I feel rather that in The Son it is more a question of waiting. In Rosetta we


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are in a dash towards something she wants—a job. Everything she does is out of her will to have, to be, to exist, to run, and the camera tries to stick to her heels. In The Son it is more a question of waiting for a word that is supposed to be spoken but is not forthcoming, and of waiting to see what Olivier will do. Even Olivier does not know. We try to show this, to take seriously the fact that when Magali asks Olivier why he is doing all this, he says that he does not know. We wanted to have the acting and the miseen-scene reflect this state of imbalance. Maybe he is going to kill the boy; maybe he is going to teach him his trade. Maybe in teaching he will also want to kill him. So, except when we are following Olivier up and down the stairs, my impression is that we are stuck to him waiting to escape this situation. And seen from behind. Quite so. Perhaps when there are more views of a person's back than usual, then when you see the face, you really look at it—more than you would if you had been looking at it all the time. LD: We filmed Olivier from the back for a lot of reasons, really. Not too long ago I saw a photograph by Dorothea Lange that I think suggests one of these reasons. The picture shows a woman of color, perhaps seventy or seventy-five, seated on a bench, probably in a New York park or street, and we are viewing her from behind. I had the feeling—very subjective— that I was seeing her whole life there on her back, on the nape of her neck. Looking at her from this angle gave me the impression of a story, one of suffering perhaps. There she was looking at the world in front of her and there on her back were the traces of her entire history. There was today's world and the character outside of it with her own particular history that the world does not notice, but we do perceive it because we are behind her. And I said to myself that Olivier is pretty much like that. There is the entire story with his son—which we do not know when the film begins; but observing him from behind we see something private and peculiar to him. However, it is something that he cannot see because he cannot look at his back. Cineaste: In your films we see many characters who come from the working class and who really strive to work. Would you comment on the sociopolitical positions that have led to your interest in depicting such characters. JPD: Oh la . . . This may stem from sociopolitical positions, but it also comes from our stance as filmmakers. Making a film is also a pleasure; it is fun. Although it is also a job, no one is forcing us do it. You have to do

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things that you want to do, and there are certain things that you want to film more than others. You not only have to be interested in filming but you also have to be able to find a certain element of passion and desire in the process. It is true that our characters belong to the working class or at least to what used to be the working class. You might say that Roger in La Promesse is declasse, a man who no longer belongs to a class. He does not have a job, although we can guess that he once did have a job. Quite visibly he does not come from the upper middle class. Rosetta, too, has been "de-classed." The working class is no longer the working class. It is no longer structured as it was at the beginning of the last century. We are truly at the end of an age, of industry, of what we have known for a hundred years. Perhaps in an immediate sense, it is because we have lived a good part of our lives within this time that we chopse to, film it and to anchor our stories around these de-classed people. If our characters had been from the 1920s or the 1930s we would not have filmed them in the same manner. Nor would we have told the story of a former worker who becomes an exploiter of foreign laborers. Such a character does not belong in the twenties or thirties; he belongs in a period when the social structures are becoming destructured. In such times you see people who are a bit lost, who try to live by exploiting those worse off than they; people who, like Rosetta, are trying to survive. The Son is more abstract since Olivier is someone who has a connection with manual labor. Such an attachment does exist, quite strongly, where we come from. Even Roger, who exploits immigrant labor, works and gets his hands dirty—even if it is to bury someone. He pushes wheelbarrows around; he labors. We explained why Olivier is a carpenter. But it might have been possible, and quite interesting, to make him teach French or math to kids who have not succeeded in the regular schools. In the end, the way we depict our characters has something, and at the same time, nothing to do with sociopolitical positions. LD: But perhaps filming gestures and very specific, material things is what allows the viewer to sense everything that is spiritual, unseen, and not a part of materiality. We tend to think that the closer one gets to the cup, to the hand, to the mouth whose lips are drinking, the more one will be able to feel something invisible—a dimension we want to follow and which would otherwise be less present in the film. How does one capture what happens when a gesture is taught? For example, when Olivier teaches the boy the movements of his trade. Yes, there is certainly the fact that the other person will do the same thing, but something else is happening, too.


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How can you capture that on film? Perhaps by filming the gestures as precisely as possible you can render apprehensible that which is not seen?

i u D K u I r l b K , JUL 1 1 L^EJ ± 5 K U I ncLrL (CINERGIE.BE/TRANSCKIPTBY CINEUROPA, 9 SEPTEMBER 2005)

MATTHIEU REYNAERT

Recently granted admission to the rather elite club of two-time winners of the Palme d'Or ("Golden Palm"), courtesy of their latest masterpiece, L'Enfant, the Dardenne Brothers, smiling away, are always in complete agreement (well, almost always . . .), taking it in turn to reply to questions and speaking with the same confidence that highlights their work. Cinergie: Luc, in the book which bears your name, you write that, while shooting he Fils, Rosetta was the albatross around your neck. Was that again the case while shooting UEnfant or did praise for Le Fils relieve you of that particular burden? And, above all, now that you probably have a new film in the pipeline, is UEnfant proving to be a monkey on your back? Luc Dardenne: [Laughs] Remember the old Leo Ferre song "It's tough lugging a kid around the whole summer"? Winning the prize at Cannes certainly did have an effect first time around and maybe even last time. But I do believe that we are two guys who betray a certain nervosity in our everyday lives, maybe even sometimes to our detriment. The most important thing is to try to retain a certain independence. I think that by talking about the film, as we're doing with you, and as we'll be doing until the end of November in the press at large, lets us shrug off the film, the prize, everything, and helps prepare us for a new start. As Truffaut used to say: "Filmmakers manage failure more easily than success." And it's true. I think that success can make you soft, dropping you into a certain comfort zone where you think that everything in the garden is rosy, but it can also paralyze you, leaving you with that "I-want-to-do-something-else-butwill-it-be-as-good?" kind of feeling. They're not real problems and you just have to turn a blind eye to them. Let's hope we manage! Cinergie: Thanks to your two Palmes d'Or, you have, in a way, become


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standard-bearers for the Belgian cinema, which isflatteringfor the powers that be, but, even after Rosetta, in order tofinanceyour films, you're still obliged to take the French shilling. Isn't that somewhat paradoxical? Jean-Pierre Dardenne: That's the fate of the industry in small countries all over, ours being all the smaller given the fact that it's culturally divided in two and sometimes even three. What we're left with is four million people. Financing is split in much the same way even if, proportionally, there's slightly less available than in France. And so wefilmmakersfrom small countries have no choice but to seek partners abroad, although that is something we can turn to our advantage. LD: That's Europe for you! JPD: It's an advantage to be able to, or rather, to have to—"able" is another story—seek partners outside, provided, of course, that partnership does not entail hardship. Thankfully, that has never happened to us. None of our partners since La Promesse has forced unwelcome locations or actors on us. If we have to compromise on the technical crew, that's no bad thing, as we have technician friends working in France and who are French. But our hand has never been forced, and that's obviously a great thing, long may it continue, with respect both to people and places. That's what really matters. Cinergie: You've been associates throughout your writer-director careers. United as you are, can either or both of you ever imagine the one or the other of you going solo? LD: I don't think so, no. We've been working together for thirty years now. At the start on our portraits, reports and documentaries, and then our fictionalfilms.We've worked together ever since meeting (Armand) Gatti, back in'73. Cinergie: Do any of yourfilms"belong" to the one more than to the other, and has either of you been the majority contributor? LD: I think not. I wouldn't do that without my brother and I think he feels the same. JPD: Not at all, I think I'd be better off on my own! So does he, but he wouldn't dare say so to my face!

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Big Brother, Little Brother

LD: (Bursts out laughing.) Cinergie: Directing duos are more the exception than the rule . . . LD: Yes, but we've always done the same things. Whenever one does one thing and the other something else, at any given moment the one could say "Hey! I'm going to try and see if I can't manage to do what you've done, something I've never been able to do on a film." But the thing is, we can both turn our hand to everything. So I just wouldn't ever feel frustrated. The only thing we haven't tried is acting .. . JPD: Maybe next time . . . LD: Actually, his nibs studied drama, so he could act, but he says he doesn't want to! He says that I say he couldn't act his way out of a brown paper bag! But it's not true! JPD: [Laughs] Cinergie: Another label you're often stuck with is that of making "socialissue films". Admittedly, once again, the environment of UEnfant can be seen for what it is but, looking at the big picture, isn't survival the true subject of all your films and the thriller your true genre? That's particularly true of your last opus. JPD: By claiming that, you're actually labeling us again, but I take it as a compliment! It's often said as a by-the-by, but maybe it's heartfelt. Because we choose characters marginalized by society, people do have a tendency to come out with "Ah, it's a social-issue film," but the actions of Bruno (Jerdmie Renier) are not dictated by need or by economics and are not, as could be the case in certain places, his only means of survival. And if we'd chosen middle-class characters, we'd have heard "Ah, psychological drama," because the middle classes "do" psychology and the rest don't! [Laughs] At the same time the choice undeniably presupposes a way of looking at the world, at society today. Cinergie: How is the link between you and the marginalization that you depict in your films established? In L'Enfant, we are left with the impression of a quasi-clinical realism when we watch the hoodlums in their altercations and petty crimes. How do you study this environment?


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LD: We don't study i t . . . (pensive). I'd say that we have a faculty which all people who tell stories of events that they have not personally experienced must have, one of being able to put oneself in other people's shoes, of imagining them, by reading what lies beneath the headlines, the court reports, and novels, or by watching television reports about people. Or by direct contact with them . . . We didn't meet a Bruno, but we did meet people whom we found a little . . . How can I put this? That we found a little different, or larger than life. We met people who resurfaced in La Promesse, Rosetta, . . . sure. I think that that's as much a part of filmmaking, too, even though I'm speaking for ourselves here as there are no laws carved in stone. I think that what distinguishes our films is that we, too, have "got a life" outside the industry. Cinergie: You refuse to see it as a microcosm. LD: You've got it in one. We produce documentaries, so we have in any case to take an interest in what's going on around us . . . And then in our private lives, we don't live in a cocoon where we only talk shop, and go watch movies. Although we have nothing against going to see films, obviously! But one does require constant reality checks. Give lectures, meet documentaryfilmmakers,watch their pictures, . . . An independent Americanfilmmaker,a la Robert Wise, acquainted with the Hollywood of the '70s, once said: "What I had to beware most of was a kind of luxury, of general comfort, when searching forfinancialback-up and actors, all of which ended up sending me to sleep. With all this stuff, you end up wrapped in cotton wool." You've got to beware of that in the film industry. Cinergie: You do not shirk from discussing fatherhood here. It's been a leitmotif of all yourfilms,ever since Je pense a vous> and one you've been consistent about. Does your being true blood brothers afford you a more comprehensive insight than your everyday "standalone" filmmaker? JPD: (Quietly) I doubt it. The subject comes up in Kazan's films, too. Shakespeare had no brothers and yet . . . Pialat, Faulkner . . . LD: (Quietly) Maybe we're beyond all that. . . Films made by brothers working together undoubtedly involve, somewhere along the line, their father and mother. Cinergie: Could the subject reach its zenith in one of your wish-list

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Big Brother, Little Brother

projects, the life of Jesus? Would you deal with it in relation to His Father, who is kind of famous in His own right? LD: [Laughs] Which? The carpenter? Cinergie: Both! LD: (Bursts out laughing.) No, when we spoke of the life of Jesus it was with the intention of recounting his life not according to the Gospels. The life of a young man of twenty, twenty-five, thirty. He didn't get around that much, and that's what interests us, too. His travels took him to, what, three towns before he got to Jerusalem, where he died. What interests us is the everyday life of the man, but you'd have to see, discover all existing traces and all the things that have been said about him, and then decide on the best way to resurrect that life. A simple life, of a man who speaks, who speaks out, who gets angry, who gets furious! I don't think we'd have to film his Passion. Because that's the story, how to turn an individual into the Son of God and an official religion, against Judaism . . . You'd have to try to stop just when he's being sentenced, but the Passion is something which, perhaps, shouldn't be done. It'd be pointless. Cinergie: But it's already been done! LD: It has, you're right! (Bursts out laughing.) And my brother has actually a tale to tell on that subject! JPD: I was sitting outdoors with someone this morning, just chatting, when someone else arrived and asked who I was. And the first person said: The Passion. (Smiles.) And the other guy says, "Wow! Bravo! Loved it!" (Both burst out laughing.)

THE DARDENNE BROTHERS AT CANNES: "WE WANT TO MAKE IT LIVE" {FILM CRITICISM, 22 SEPTEMBER 2005) KARINBADT

Imagine a movie that begins with a scuffle, an.adult struggling with an adolescent, a scene that does not denote danger but a scream of anarchy. Imagine the movie continuing as a jerky episodic depiction of this conflict, a conflict that assumes the guise of adult versus child, child versus society, and child versus self. Throughout, we lurch along with our protagonists, involved in their rough ride by the handheld camera, close-ups of silent brooding faces, and the "music" of urban travel—motorcars, buses, and mopeds—until some unexpected end. This would be a typical Dardenne brother movie. The two Belgian brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre (older by two years), established their forte as directors of a lively form of "realism" when they won thje prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1999 with Rosetta, a fiction film that grew out of their experience shooting factory strikes in the industrial zone of Belgium. In Rosetta, we have a proletariat girl who struggles against the only home she has, her drunken mother's trailer existence in the mud. By hook and by crook, Rosetta tries to get "jobs" to survive, a battle for existence that seems to have no outcome but circularity. Throughout, she wrestles with her mother (literally in the mud), fends off employers who want tofireher, and struggles with a near-boyfriend whom, despite his helpfulness, she betrays. Two struggles end with someone dunked in the water, a metaphor of a forced "baptism" that does not result in new life, although rebirth was, it is clear, Rosetta* s aim. For, like the main characters of the Dardennes' La Promesse (1996) and Le Fils (2002), she is searching for a moral anchor. This year at Cannes, the edgy new realism of the Dardenne brothers once again earned international acclaim: they again won the prestigious Palme d'Or for their new film, L'Enfant, the story of Bruno, a vagabond who panders for money through drug-selling, spending his nights shacking up in a hut on the beach or in homeless shelters. Bruno's girlfriend Sonia

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The Dardenne Brothers at Cannes: "We Want to Make It Live"

enjoys the vagabond ride with him, gives birth to a child that forces the conflict of the movie. As in Le Fils> the journey to accepting the role of "father" informs the moral crisis. Throughout the film, we have scuffles, fights, explosions—none too violent but all indicative of the amoral wasteland in which these lost souls wander, battles that flare up spontaneously along the way. And as in Rosetta, we even have a "dunking in the water," a baptism that in this film, the Dardenne brothers explained, leads not to death (their original thought for the ending) but to a new stage of the journey. I spoke to the Dardenne brothers at Cannes, right before they learned that they had won the top prize of the festival. Their own liveliness—their spontaneous pleasure in sharing their creative process—mirrors the freshness of their art. Karin Badt: Both your previous film Le Fils and your new film UEnfant feature a character who must learn how to be a father, to recognize the child, and in doing so become a human being himself. Why does this theme interest you so much? Luc Dardenne: We thought that with this story we can testify to our times. This is our forte: we are aware like you of what is going on in the world, so we worked on this theme. We asked ourselves why Bruno does not recognize his child, who is a human being, a living being, and why he is not able to be a father. Jean-Pierre Dardenne: Bruno resonates with today's world because of his lightness; he lives in such lightness, with formidable liberty, where nothing has any importance. Everything has the same importance, which is the same as none. Even he himself has no importance for himself. He's someone who has no attachments. We even thought to make him die in an early draft. He is not a Machiavellian character; he lives in the moment, with no perspective; he tries to answer his own needs of the instant. LD: A child is evidently a different matter; there is a duration, a future, with a child. A child takes time. And time is not something Bruno is good at. JPD: It's not by accident that Bruno never wants to carry this child. Because if he did, there would be a bit of weight, and he wants to keep his lightness. He takes the child for the first time to sell him: the only time.


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KLB: So it's not just about father—son, it's about recognizing the other in general. LD: Yes it's the same in Rosetta, La Promesse, where a man betrays his father so as to recognize his wife as a human being. For us, it's always more or less the same thing. KLB: Interestingly, Bruno takes on his role as a father when he becomes vulnerable. Are vulnerability and responsibility connected? LD: Yes. We saw the film yesterday with the public—which is always a bit difficult for us!—and there's the scene when the guy in the garage accuses Bruno of having taken an extra bill. And Bruno responds like a child who is at fault: "I didn't do it on purpose!" KLB: So he becomes a child himself! LD: [Laughs] Sure, if you like. KLB: What difference would it have made if this story took place in a bourgeois home rather than a poor environment? How important is the social context to you? LD: We're interested in people like Bruno, like Rosetta, like Francis. In a bourgeois context, it would have been a different psychology, a perversion. We did not want to make Bruno a pervert. Nor did we want to say that his moral fault is due to his poverty. And yet it is true that it is related. On the one hand, his way of living from day to day is very free, very alive: one sleeps where one finds a spot, one finds another spot if there is no spot. We like that, to see people who can live this way, without comfort. But at the same time, these people have no future. They don't say anything, but they feel it. Everything is stuck for them. It's useless to look for work, because there is none. Our character fights to survive, but why fight—everything is blocked? So why have a child? Everything is closed for him. KLB: Indeed, Bruno sleeps in something that looks like a coffin. LD: His cardboard sleeping bag! That's what we called it on the set. He puts himself inside it to be secure—a common hum^n feeling—like Nosferatu, the vampire.

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The Dardenne Brothers at Cannes: "We Want to Make It Live" KLB: Do you personally know people in this social stratum?

LD: Yes, but not who sold their child. We did research into this universe, for example, into bingo, because lots of people who don't have money, who can't go to a casino, play bingo in a bistro. A "bin" is worth a euro, but you can make a deal with the bistro owner that a bin is worth fifty euros. If the police come, you switch to saying it's worth five euros. Bruno probably thought he could make a lot of money playing bingo. Bingo is the casino for the poor, where they lose lots of money, or make money, and have bar-room brawls. KLB: How are your films similar to those of Kaurismaki, who also treats the same social strata? LD: We like Kaurismaki's films a lot, but Kaurismaki has a humor that we don't. KLB: What spectator do you wish to attract? LD: Anyone who walks into the theater. Yesterday during the screening, people laughed during the film, and especially at one moment which we did not expect: when Bruno sold his girlfriend's jacket. We never thought that people would laugh then. But then we laugh at moments that perhaps nobody laughs at. Perhaps we have a strange sense of humor that we can't communicate. KLB: How do you two brothers work together as a creative partnership? JPD: It has changed a lot over the years. We used to live together in the same house, but then because of problems between our wives, it became difficult. Even today if we went back to living together, it would still be difficult, because the women didn't know what role they played. LD: And the children! JPD: Work creates a fusional relationship; it takes up so much of our daily life. Now we see each other very often, several times a week, to make our films. We have two production houses, one for documentaries, one for fiction films. We live in two different cities—Ltege and Dessel— and that too because of our wives.


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KLB: Do you have different talents in filmmaking? JPD: No, we are equally handicapped! On the set, we evenly divide the work. There will be one who works with the camera monitor, while the other works with the actors. Then we switch. LD: We work together from beginning to finish: we discuss our new film for a few months, and then we make an outline—a structure—of the film. I write the first draft of the script, Jean-Pierre reads it, and then we re-write it until we have five or six versions. When we think we are nearly finished, or we have just a few small problems, we send it to a French producer, Denis Freyd in Paris, of Archipel 35, and we await his comments. (Yes, just one critic. If you send it to two critics, you're finished.) Denis generally points out the same problems that we saw. Then we re-work it, and begin the casting with afriendwho has a video camera, and then we look for locations. Finally we begin filming. We shoot chronologically. Four weeks before we finish, the editor already begins her work, and so by the end of the filming, she has practically finished the first version. We made L'Enfant in three months: from 15 December to 15 March. JPD: Since we spend a lot of time investigating the locales before we begin filming, we already have a clear idea of how we want the camera to move and how to block the actors. So when we get to the set, we don't need a storyboard. In fact, we never use a storyboard, because it's terrible for us: it becomes an onerous ordre de mission to fill out and follow: shot one, shot two, shot three. But we have a storyboard in our mind, even though we don't tell anyone. LD: This lets us avoid the bureaucratization of the process. If you have a storyboard, someone says: "Hey, you said not this shot, but this one!" JPD: This allows for surprises on the set: the actors can tell us if they want to make changes. We will have discussed already how we think a shot should run, but perhaps when we see the actual take, we get a better idea, and do. something else. Normally, we do three or more takes of the same scene. We did twenty takes of this film. LD: No, we don't let our actors improvise, but they can tell us if they don't feel at ease with certain lines. For example, in the scene on the border of the water, in which the boy tells his girlfriend, "I sold Jimmy,"

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we added the sentence, "Where is Jimmy?" This change was important, because in the original script, the hut did not exist. Jimmy slept outside, and now we have him inside when the scene begins. JPD: We spend a lot of time in preparation, finding costumes, locations. We know the locations well, since we always film in the same city where we once lived ourselves, Seraing, next to Liege. We know this city well. We do most of our documentaries there, and all of our fiction films. Many scenes of La Promesse, Rosetta, Le Fils, and L*Enfant were filmed in the same locations. Even so, we spend an enormous amount together in preparation, so that when we finally get to the set, "life" is present on our set, not just "film-work." We want the spectator to feel that there is "life"—true life—on the set, that we are working with a limited budget, that we are not with prefabricated figures. KLB: It's not just "life," it's liveliness. For example, I'm thinking of your splendid scene of playful struggle in the c a r . . . LD: We did about ten takes of that scene. There the only thing we had "fixed" was that she bit his hand, with the music. They enjoyed improvising and experimenting with the scene. The girl slapped him at one point... KLB: You have such an open approach. But do you keep a strict schedule? LD: No. We wake up at 7:30 in the morning, in the dead of winter, and film until five in the evening, or seven, if it's an exterior shot. We always film in the winter, because we like the cold. We like the fact that there is not much light, that it is diffused—and constant. You know how winter is in northern Europe. Winter light makes the colors come out: the red, the black, the gray, the flowers, in all their intensity. Winter sunlight is not a sunlight that crushes. KLB: Sound also has an intense emotional role in your films, reminiscent of the work of Eric Rohmer. For example, in Le Fils, you have a charged scene between man and child, where all the emotions comes out in the sound of wood being cut. Here the sound of the motorcycle, the bus, takes a central role. Why this emphasis on sound?


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LD: We have no music in our films. So the "sound" is our music. We don't have any other. KLB: Can you imagine making films outside of Belgium? LD: One of ourfriendstold us if we had to make films outside of our city, we couldn't make them. It is difficult to make films outside your country unless you work in a studio, because it's not the same location, the same language, the same body. You can't see Nanni Moretti shooting the film in Denmark. KLB: A question about your colleagues' work. Why are so many film directors at this festival obsessed with the failed family, with the issue of assuming paternity? Jarmusch, Haneke, Wenders . . . JPD: We would think it's because cinema is reflecting our world, and without a doubt, the family is changing, and the role of the father is changing. We directors are making films about the world we see. The family is breaking down. LD: And telling stories that resonate with what's happening with the world is related to the history of television. With the advent of television, cinema became disconnected from reality. TV was doing that job. But now, TV is interested only in itself, as a medium of images: reality shows. So ifs up to film to bring spectators in contact with the world around them. KLB: Yes, but—in reference to Jean-Pierre just said about the disintegrating family—you yourselves have the threatened nuclear family reconstituted at the end, with an act of forgiveness. LD: [Laughs] Yes, the only thing missing is the dog! We were originally thinking of having him die at the end, rather like Accatone. But we decided we needed to give him a reason for living, of course not as he lived before. We decided that Sonia's love would not be enough. Also, Sonia could no longer love him as he is. In fact, she closes the door and says, rightly, "You lie with each breath." And so we didn't make him die. KLB: Still it is his love of Sonia that makes him change . . .

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LD: But he had to work on himself by himself before that love is possible. KLB: Back to your theme of recognizing the "other." Do you really believe that everyone is capable of making this moral evolution? I once met a criminal psychiatrist who said some people can't evolve, that they have no conscience. LD: I do think there are cases in which it is impossible to have a second birth. These people are cut in two, have two personalities. There's one personality that does not communicate. These people would be better off in prison. But yes, I do have great faith. I have a great faith in the amelioration of the human being.

TALKING TO PALME D' OR WINNERS Luc AND JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE (GUARDIAN/NFT INTERVIEW, 11 FEBRUARY 2006) GEOFF ANDREW

Geoff Andrew: One of your earliest films was the documentary Lorsque le bateau de Leon M descendit la, Meuse pour la premi&re fois. How and why did you go into filmmaking, and why into documentary filmmaking? Luc Dardenne: I think it's because we met a theatre director and writer, Armand Gatti, who had fought with the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, when he was eighteen. He wrote and made films, and in 1960, he made a great film called Uenclos. He then came to Belgium and was teaching at the drama school where my brother was studying, and that's how we met. We worked with him, and when he went to Germany, he left us, and we wondered what we could do. He worked with a camera, which we'd never touched before. So we worked for some months to earn money to buy a video camera. And then we did the kind of things he had been doing, making portraits of people. For him, this was an extension of his theatre work, but for us, we were interested in going to the workers' areas. A lot of these workers' estates have no communal space, and so there's no place for people to talk to each other, so we decided that we would go and film these people and tell their stories, perhaps of moments in their lives where they come up against some injustice. So we would film them during the week and then on the weekend show the films in a cafd or a local church. And that was a way for people to see and listen to other people in the same estate. We did that for a few years, and then we started to build on that experience and to write our own stories. That's how it developed. GA: The films look pretty political—they're about labor relations and community history. Did you see yourself as political filmmakers at the time?

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Talking to Palme d'Or Winners Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne

Jean-Pierre Dardenne: We kind of started on a false premise—we thought that no one was telling these stories. This point of view came about more from the fact that we didn't know that there were already films about the workers' movement. So ignorance was what motivated us, but perhaps not a conscious ignorance. We just weren't aware that we didn't know, we just thought there was nothing there. And that's what motivated us to do, among others, this film. But above all, it was meeting the man [Leon Mazy] who built the boat. We had met him before, when we were making another film, and he told us stories. We had a rather ambitious project of making a film focusing on different periods in the workers' movement in our region. The first one would have been set in the Second World War, focusing on the resistance against the Nazis. We met a lot of people—some we filmed but never found a place for in one of our documentaries, others we never filmed but just chatted with and listened to. We took great pleasure in meeting them and listening to their stories. And among these people was Leon Mazy, who became the main character of this film. He had been an important militant in the workers' movement in Seraing, an area that we have used in many of our films. At one point, he had become discouraged. They had given him a position in the factory that isolated him from other people. His job was controlling the flow, in and out, of water to the foundry, so he would spend eight hours a day looking at dials on his instrument panel. But the job didn't take into account the fact that he was a very good mechanic, and also prevented him from seeing people. So, discouraged, he decided to invest all his knowledge into building a boat, and then he would leave. So we wanted to make a film about how his construction of the boat was a way for him to recover his dignity, and also, the journey of the boat down the river would lead him to rediscover the places that had been important to the workers' movement through the years. It was an idea that Armand Gatti himself might have come up with. GA: After making documentaries for a few years, you then made your first feature, Falsch, which was based on a play and was a very nonnaturalistic film. And then you made a film called Je pense a vous, which, like your documentaries, is set in Seraing, and is about a man who suddenly finds himself made redundant, and finds that very difficult. In a way, it's the link between your documentaries and your later films. But you were very unhappy with this film—why? LD: The script itself, the choice of actors, set, film crew, none of these things were our decisions. Not that these decisions were made by others


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and imposed on us, but things were happening without us saying yes or no. We kind of said yes to things because we ourselves didn't know. We didn't know where to put the camera, so an actor would say, "Why not put it here?" and the director of photography would say, "Why not over there?" and then the assistant director would bring in his point of view. So this film was made, not against us, but without us. I think we got frightened with cinema. We came from working with video, and we weren't regarded as filmmakers by the profession. In fact, we were seen as comedians, not serious. I think we internalized a lot of things and told ourselves that we had to learn a lot. It's unfortunate because on the film, everybody wanted the best for us, but in actual fact, what they were doing was just digging a bigger hole and we were sinking. One thing that was important for us, that we had on Falsch but not on Je pense a vous, was a video monitor. For us that's crucial because when we shoot, one of us is behind the video monitor while the other is with the actors. And that's how we talk, we discuss the work that we're doing in front of the monitor. Without it, we weren't really able to work, the two of us, together. So, that's one of the reasons why this film, for us, was very bad. GA: I'm going to turn now to Au dos de nos images—On the Back of Our Images—this book that's a collection of excerpts from Luc's diary but which Luc says also includes Jean-Pierre's thoughts. You say in the book that La Promesse was in many ways your first film—what were the decisions you made on La Promesse that ensured you didn't make the same mistakes as on Je pense a vousl JPD: What I remember is this: we said two things to each other—first, cinema is not obligatory; there are a lot of things one can do in life. If it doesn't work for us this time, we'll just find other things to do. What, we didn't know yet, but something. Second, we told each other we had to find again the joy and freedom we had when we worked on documentaries, when it was just we two. And we knew that between us, we covered all the parts needed for filmmaking. And this translated in each stage of the project: for the script, we went into it ourselves and didn't let anything out. Because after Je pense a vous, the world of Belgian cinema was whispering that they had assisted in our suicide. So we decided that they had all become our enemies, and having enemies is very important to start to work. So we worked on the script, and we told ourselves a few things: that we would not work with well-known actors; we would work in locations chosen only by ourselves; the crew around us would only be friends and people chosen by us; and we would organize every aspect of

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Talking to Palme d'Or Winners Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne

the shoot ourselves. And most of all, we would have the least possible amount of technology, of technical mediation. Because we'd noticed that on the previous film, which was not a heavy film, we had felt like the shop-floor manager in a factory, which is still a respectable job, but not what we wanted to do. What we came to realize was that it was more important to use the time to work with actors and their bodies. So everything had to be organized from that starting point: working with the actor's body. We also realized that on the last film, we didn't know where to position the camera. What we hadn't realized was that in order to film what you want to show on a face or a body, you first have to decide what you want to hide. So with these rules, we went on. GA: La Promesse is a film about a father and a son. It seems to me to be a subject that you keep coming back to—it's certainly there in Le Fils and L'Enfant. Why this fascination with parental relations? LD: I keep getting the heavy questions. Well, the subject is the beginning of humanity: that's where we come from. When you go back in time, it's the story of the father and mother; and the future is the story of our children and their children. The day that we are unable to be fathers and mothers, then humanity is finished. That's when the monkey will come back to claim his skull, and animals will rule on this planet. What we're interested in is what can still happen between a parent and a child. Maybe it comes also from the fact that in the city where we make our films, we have seen families destroyed by economic crisis, drugs, unemployment, truancy, and now kids are earning more than their parents but from illegal means. People are more and more alone. When we first wrote La Promesse, we had an older character who was supposed to provide guidance to the younger characters. But then we realized that this was nostalgic—now, there is no one to be that voice. So we put them in a situation and asked the question, how are these people, who are now alone and without the help of the past, going to find their way to be fully human. That's very paradoxical because, as in.La Promesse, to become human, the young boy needs to betray his father, when normally it should be the opposite. GA: Interestingly, in your book, you reveal that your scripts go through many changes. For instance, Rosetta in the original script had a father. I know that Le Fils was partly inspired by the James Bulger case here in Liverpool in 1993, but the film didn't get made until 2002. Do you feel it's important to give your films a long time to gestate?


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LD: Yes. We're a bit like cows, we like to graze. It's true, the event in Liverpool marked us, as it did everybody else. GA: It seems to me that your stories are based on real-life events, but also stories from the Bible and mythology. For instance, you often talk about the story of Abraham and Isaac in relation to Le Fils. LD: Yes, because Abraham doesn't have to kill Isaac, and that's the foundation of humanity. We thought a lot about that when we made Le Fils. We like to chat between ourselves about these Biblical characters, and people from literature as well. Before we make a film, we often talk about related books and exchange ideas. JPD: To add to what my brother said, we read Toni Morrison before La Promesse. And one thing that impresses us about her writing and the way she organized her stories, is how a reader is drawn into the story— you're never sure where you are but little by little, clarity comes through. GA: And that's a method you like to use—very often you plunge us into a situation and it is only very gradually that we discover why these characters are behaving in that way towards each other. JPD: Thank you, Toni Morrison.

Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne: Essays and Interviews

Writing Liverpool: Essays and Interviews

The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema

The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema

Luc

Robbery Committed and

Committed

Withnail and Us: Cult Films and Film Cults in British Cinema (Cinema and Society)

Committed

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. - Films

Power and Possibility: Essays, Reviews, and Interviews (Poets on Poetry)

Being Committed

Collected Interviews: Voices from Twentieth-Century Cinema

Nazis and the Cinema

Rivette: Texts and interviews

Interviews and Recollections of Karl Marx (Interviews & recollections)

Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema

Crime Films (Genres in American Cinema)

Crime Films (Genres in American Cinema)

Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933-1945 (Cinema and Society)

Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933-1945 (Cinema and Society)

Cinema and the Great War (Cinema and Society)

Waveguide Spectroscopy of Thin Films, Volume 33 (Thin Films and Nanostructures) (Thin Films and Nanostructures)

Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy

Ceramic Films and Coatings

Polymolecular and Monomolecular Films

The Films of G.W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema (Films in Print Series)

British Popular Films, 1929-1939: The Cinema of Reassurance (Studies in Film, Television and the Media)

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible (Cambridge Film Classics)

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. Volume 1. Films

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