****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Jérémie Renier, Olivier Gourmet, Assita Ouedraogo, Rasmane Ouedraogo
written and directed by Luc Dardenne & Jean-Pierre Dardenne
click any image to enlarge
by Bryant Frazer Since the mid-1990s,
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have been the standard-bearers for French-language
Belgian cinema. Born in Engis and raised in nearby Seraing (both located in the
industrial Belgian province of Liège), the Dardennes started making
documentaries in the 1970s, followed by a pair of narrative films they
immediately disavowed. 1996's La promesse was a completely fresh start.
The Dardennes' non-fiction work demonstrated a social consciousness that
remained in effect once they found their narrative voice, and it's amazing how
fully realized this effort is, exhibiting many of the formal strategies and
much of the narrative sensibility that would serve them well over the next
decade and a half.
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But at the time, La promesse seemed to come from nowhere. Set against the backdrop of Seraing
itself–a factory-rich city whose working class has suffered as the steel industry
flees the country–the film is mostly about a teenaged boy, Igor (Jérémie
Renier), living with his father, Roger (Olivier Gourmet), who smuggles
immigrants into the country and puts them to work illegally. Roger keeps them
under his thumb by hiring them to rehabilitate the same shabby
apartment building where he rents them rooms, then collecting the government
stipends they're due (according to the Dardennes, undocumented workers with a
Belgian address were, at the time, eligible for Belgian welfare benefits). Igor
is his loyal accomplice in all this workaday shadiness. That starts to change after one of the workers' wives, Assita (Assita Ouedraogo), arrives from Burkina
Faso, infant in tow.
Igor takes a special
interest in Assita, perhaps partly because she's a slim, fetching addition to the
stable of hard-luck cases who populate the building and he is a 14-year-old
boy. More than sexy, though, she's exotic, with a rich, brown complexion that together with her wary
demeanour highlights how different she is from Igor, a pale, laid-back
blonde. An accident on the job provides the film its title: Assita's
husband, Amidou, suffers a grievous injury and lives just long enough to ask
that Igor look after his wife and son. Igor nods his assent. And so his
rubbernecking interest in Assita's welfare turns into a personal investment.
Roger, of course, has
no such commitment. His response to the crisis is to hide Amidou's body and start cooking up schemes to get rid of the loose thread that Assita represents.
As soon as Igor's promise puts him at odds with his father, La promesse
becomes a particular kind of coming-of-age story. It's about that moment when
children become cognizant of their own personhood, and when they discover that
their own morals don't line up, exactly, with those instilled in them by a
too-fallible parent. There are more questions still: Is confession a moral
responsibility? And when does the son bear the responsibility to turn against
his father?
The worst rap I can
think of against La promesse is that this tale is a bit rote in its
particulars. Amidou's accident–he falls from a scaffold as local authorities
show up unannounced and Roger and Igor scramble to keep their illicit workforce
under wraps–is the stuff of formula filmmaking, as is his deathbed insistence
that Igor protect the family he leaves behind. There's also a line of dialogue
in which Roger discovers that young Igor is still a virgin, followed by the
inevitable scene where Igor sits uncomfortably in the presence of the
prostitute his father has procured. What makes it all work is that, in the
Dardennes' hands, the story's moral framework is powerful. When Roger buys his son a
sexual surrogate, he doesn't see the awkwardness inherent in the
transaction or doesn't value the possibility that Igor may prefer to lose it
in the (no less awkward) company of a girl he loves, or thinks he loves, or at
least thinks he has a chance with. Something is at stake here. Roger is trying
to usher the boy into manhood, but his take on human relations is impatient and irretrievably corrupt. It's a mantle that Igor will struggle to shrug off
over the course of the film.
The results
could, of course, have been catastrophically didactic. The Dardennes said later
that the picture was originally scripted with an older, retired factory worker
weighing in on how poorly Igor's father treated his lodgers. Getting rid of
that character was a good idea–it's plenty clear that Igor's soul is in jeopardy
without a supporting lecture from some one-man Greek chorus lurking around the
margins of the story. While La promesse may literally be about the promise
Igor makes to Amidou, there's a metaphorical one, too: the promise we make
to teach our children. Igor is a motherless child, and I got the sense that the
Dardennes were distressed at the notion of a sensitive boy with so much
potential being raised in an environment that's long fouled by a poisonous
aura of macho self-reliance. Though I instinctively resist attempts to code
parenting skills and responsibilities by gender, I'm inclined to allow the
point.
In the years to come,
the Dardennes would maintain their focus on the hard decisions faced by poor
people forced into bad situations by social circumstances mixed–often–with
their own lousy decisions or personal shortcomings. Critics typically trace
their work to Rossellini and Italian neorealism, and for good reason: Just as neorealist films took as their subject of study the special conditions
on the streets of Italy in the years following the Second World War, the
Dardennes have plenty to look at in their own environs. La promesse
documents the underbelly of the global economy and could be read in part as a
parable of French colonialism in Burkina Faso, where the population was
redirected to serve as cheap labour in the plantations and factories of Côte d'Ivoire. In a more immediate sense, it's an
exposé of the ways the lower class find to exploit the even-lower class among
them, and of the obstinance of racism and xenophobia on the continent. At one
point, a biker goes out of his way to piss on Assita's head. She takes it in stride,
which somehow makes the attack that much more dispiriting, although it's
instructive to Igor on the subject of pride, resilience, and human dignity.
In La promesse,
the Dardennes had already found a way to help facilitate audience
identification with their protagonists. Working with a general restriction
against using too much gear on set (e.g., laying down track for dollies, spending
time on elaborate lighting arrangements), they shot quickly using a 16mm camera, which is smaller and generally more manoeuvrable than a 35mm one, allowing them to keep
the camera in close. In fact, it is generally so close to Igor that
several scenes feature the back of his head, with movie-watchers looking past him
as he walks from room to room. It's a compelling tactic that lends a
propulsive, forward-moving feeling to what otherwise could be fairly staid
material. It helps establish some of the geography of places in the Dardennes'
movies, and it gives a more lived-in feeling to locations like this film's
apartment block. Yet what's crucial is that proximity encourages audience
identification with the Dardennes' characters, ensuring that viewers really do
join them on their journeys.
Religion is never
explicitly invoked (although you might say a scene where Assita looks for
answers in a pile of chicken entrails suggests the distance between European
Christianity and traditional African culture), but sin and redemption are
clearly on the table. Igor invests both time and money in an effort to put
things right and eventually gives himself up completely, rejecting his father
in what may be the clearest and most resonant moral choice of his lifetime. For
Igor, La promesse is a triumph. The boy, educated in the precepts of
meanness and chicanery, has learned compassion, and his life will almost
certainly be richer for it. The woman, alone, bereft, and bearing a son of her
own, has a less hopeful future. We can't know how she feels, but we can at
least begin to imagine her suffering, not to mention the feeling that her boy
companion, a proletarian by any measure yet a child of privilege compared to
her, is little more than an avatar of her aloneness. It's something Igor can
never atone for. That's La promesse in a nutshell–a simultaneous
inspiration and rebuke, believing in the power of individuals to do the right
thing but never dumb enough to argue that its own soul-saving denouement has
mitigated anyone else's unhappy endings.
THE BLU-RAY DISC
Criterion has
released La promesse on DVD and Blu-ray simultaneously, and while I'm
sure the DVD is a high-quality encode of the new master (scanned from a 35mm
interpositive), the Blu-ray is quite handsome, and argues strenuously against
the somewhat widely-held notion that low-budget independent films don't benefit from the HD treatment as much as blockbusters do. La
promesse was actually shot on Super16 and blown up to 35mm, and in
terms of transferring the breadth of visual information in the frame–not just
picture detail, but the texture of the film grain–the Blu-ray shines. I don't know
the status of the Dardennes' camera negatives, so I don't know if it would have
been possible for Criterion to begin at the original negative rather
than with an IP, but that might have been nice (and would have no doubt reduced the
grain). Still, the image is exceptionally film-like, with saturated colours and
strong contrast and delineation, from the shadows up to the
highlights. Movies shot in a naturalistic style similar to that employed by the
Dardennes can look drab and underlit on DVD, where the texture of the filmed
image is necessarily smoothed out by the lower resolution and colours are too
often dialled in carelessly, resulting in a flat, unappealing quality. None of
those objections apply here: the presentation is bold and solid. The transfer was encoded in AVC/H.264 format with an average bit rate of 39.9 Mbps–plenty of
data to deal with that twinkling layer of grain–and pillarboxed to an
aspect ratio of 1.67:1.
The DTS-HD MA track (French-language only) represents a 24-bit remaster and a new
mix that maps the original four-channel magnetic masters to the 5.1 soundfield.
In theory, this should allow a superior rendition of the theatrical soundmix,
which was matrixed to two-channel Dolby Stereo. And the disc does sound really,
really good, despite a paucity of directional information. A wee bit of the movie's ambience may be spread into the surround channels at some point, though it's not enough that I noticed on a regular viewing.
Extras are at the
minimum level we expect from Criterion releases of films by contemporary (i.e.,
living) directors, if reasonably informative. The centrepiece is a lengthy
(one full hour) video segment of critic Scott Foundas interviewing the
Dardennes in detail, from their Liège headquarters, about La promesse.
They discuss the process through which the picture was conceived (it was inspired
by a newspaper article they read about the arrest of some Burkina Faso emigrants who were promised passage to Italy but waylaid and put to work
upon their arrival in Belgium) and help define the "Dardennes style" of its
execution. It's easy to watch, largely because the Dardennes seem like quite
affable hosts, and Foundas is a fine interviewer; but when I'm confronted with
talking-head pieces of this length, I often find myself longing for the
much-maligned audio commentary, which allows me to soak up the same info while
immersed once again in the images of a film.
More manageable is a
19-minute segment that intersperses recently-recorded interviews with Renier
and Gourmet with illustrative clips from La promesse. The duo share
some tidbits about the Dardennes' working methods, including their unconventional
approach to auditions, and intelligently and modestly discuss the
nature of their performances. Gourmet muses on how upbringing, life
experiences, and surroundings etch themselves into the lines of a person's face and
body. He goes on to suggest that an actor who successfully conjures a rich life
story for the character will find his own body taking on
characteristics of that imagined life. Renier, for his part, describes acting
for the Dardennes as a very–even purely–physical endeavour. He remembers
shooting a scene from L'enfant in which either he or co-star Déborah
François was eating an apple. One of them asked the Dardennes what they should
be thinking as they bit into the fruit. The response came back: "Don't
think. Just eat it. We'll take care of the rest." Additionally, a French-language theatrical trailer, just over a minute in length, is encoded in
HD but seems to have been upconverted from a PAL transfer. And that's all,
folks, but for a booklet with obligatory Kent Jones essay. Follow Bryant Frazer on Twitter
