If you’re new to the works of the
Dardenne Brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, there may be a little explaining
necessary before you dive into their films. It may be overstating things to say
that they ushered in a new school of European cinema (and it may not be) but
it’s not overstating things to say that over their last five films, they have
won more major awards at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival than any
filmmakers ever. Ever. Let that thought stew for a bit. In the mid-1970’s
Jean-Pierre and Luc founded a production company and began to produce
documentaries of their own and by other filmmakers, examining the social
climate of modern Europe, the fallout of WWII, and other topics, often leaning
toward looking at poverty and immigration with a strong social conscience. By
the 1990’s, they had turned to narrative filmmaking, garnering great notice
with 1996’s La Promesse, which paved the way for 1999’s Rosetta,
which walked home with the Palme D’Or from Cannes – the first Belgian film ever
to do so – for its portrayal of a young woman who works to try to escape the
desperate poverty in which she and her alcoholic mother live (both films are
slated for release by the Criterion Collection on 8/14).
And it is under the shadow of their
success with
Rosetta that the Dardennes, feeling great pressure to make
a worthy follow-up, created
The Son (
Le Fils). Given their
training in documentary filmmaking, they use many documentary techniques – no
sound effects beyond on-site sound, frequent use of existing lighting and
locations, no score to emotionally underpin scenes – to create their story.
Coupled with their frequent use of medium close-ups of their actors and their
penchant for long takes (they say in a commentary that the film consists of
about 80 takes – by contrast, the famous 3-minute shower scene in
Psycho
has 50), the style lends a directness and realism to the picture that is at
times uncomfortable. The actors play down their roles and behave like real
people instead of movie characters, and in the manner of the best Ingmar
Bergman films, there are moments where we feel like we’re present in a
tumultuous moment of someone else’s actual life when maybe we shouldn’t be
there watching. The center of this film, and the winner of the Cannes Best
Actor award for his performance here, is Olivier Gourmet, playing Olivier, a
carpenter who teaches his trade at a vocational school for troubled youth (it’s
no surprise to learn that the Dardennes conceived the film as a vehicle for
Gourmet after working with him on their previous two features). When a new
youth, Francis (played by Morgan Marinne), arrives at the school, Olivier at
first refuses to accept him into his class, instead following the youth around
the school and spying on him. Soon, he relents and accepts him into his class
and this is where it’s time to stop talking about the plot.
Nothing much has happened to this
point except that we’ve come to see the routine day-to-day behavior of both
principles, including Olivier’s odd obsession, and before long, at about a half
hour into the film, information is divulged to the audience that drastically
changes our perception of the relationship between the two. And it’s the
mastery of the Dardennes’ tightly held camera shots – kudos here due to
cinematographer Alain Marcoen, who has worked with the brothers on every film
from
La Promesse forward and contributed greatly to their trademark
visual style – their casual yet precise way of offering up plot details with a
nonchalance that lets the audience have just enough information to carry us
through, their methods of working with their cast to create the pitch-perfect
performances (especially, though not limited to, Gourmet’s inscrutable
performance of murky motives) that generates a nearly unbearable tension in the
film. They play off and confound our expectations of what might happen, what
we’ve seen in a dozen or a thousand other movies, and what we might do in the
same situation that Olivier finds himself in. They don’t go out of their way to
explain things unnecessarily – when Olivier is asked at one point in the film
why he’s doing what he’s doing, he says “I don’t know.” And we’re left to put
it together and take in what we see on-screen and our own reactions to it.
The
Dardennes have a gift for films about troubled young people that is at once
sympathetic to the issues and choices facing them, but clear eyed about the
fact that these are choices they make, not inevitabilities. What they also have
that more cynical filmmakers lack is a sense of their films treading a line
between disaster and hope – will whatever past history binds Olivier and
Francis be overcome or will it consume them? More than the specific plot
machinations, it’s that tension that makes the films go, and The Son, no
less than their Palme D’or honored films Rosetta or The Child,
makes the most of that tension.
- Patrick
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