And so begins Luc and Jean-Pierre’s Dardenne’s La promesse, the film that put them on the international cinematic map (it was a hit at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes and became a critical darling around the world). Beginning the film with the protagonist, Igor (Jérémie Renier), stealing from a kindly elderly woman is certainly a daring a move from a storytelling perspective, but it is also a crucial one because the film charts Igor’s moral awakening as he shifts from being complicit in the exploitation of others to recognizing their shared humanity and trying to make a difference in at least one person’s life. The Dardennes’ unadorned, stripped down cinematic style, which they consciously developed for this film after a miserable experience with their second feature, Je pense à vous (1992), is perfectly suited to their focus on the daily grind of the lower working classes, a topic they have explored again and again in all of their subsequent films.

Set, like virtually of their films, in the eastern Belgian industrial town of Seraing, the story in La promesse focuses on Igor, who works with his father Roger (Olivier Gourmet) renting apartments and providing falsified papers to undocumented workers. It is a purely exploitative business enterprise, as Roger has no sympathy for the men and women who sneak into Belgium seeking a better life, but rather sees them as revenue and potential free labor for his renovation projects. The film is steeped in the kinds of small details involving pay-offs and petty exchanges and veiled threats that give it the rough verisimilitude associated with documentaries (not surprisingly, the Dardennes started their cinematic career making documentaries, their first being a government-commissioned film on working-class housing projects in the 1970s). Igor, who hides his youthfulness behind cigarettes and a toughened exterior, is loyal to his father, who mostly treats him like another hired hand, which he mistakes as affection. There are small moments of tenderness, but we get the sense that Roger doesn’t really know how to love other people, only how to manage them. The film’s looming tragedy is that Igor is on a path to turn out exactly like his father, thus perpetuating a cruel cycle of manipulation and abuse.

The turning point for Igor is the accidental death of one of the undocumented workers and Roger’s insistence that they cover it up and hide the evidence from the man’s wife, Assita (Assita Ouedraogo), who he had recently brought in from Burkina Faso along with their infant child. Roger is incapable of seeing the man’s death as anything other than a risk to his business, which is why he can’t fathom telling Assita the truth. Instead, he tries every means possible to convince her to simply leave the country, as if her absence will somehow negate his culpability in the loss of another human life. Igor goes along with his father’s cover-up for a while, but his conscience gnaws at him, raised by both the dying man’s request that he look after his wife and his own instinctive recognition that he is the only link between her and the truth. It is a testament to the film’s subtle powers that there is no “a-ha!” moment in which Igor realizes he should do the right thing, but rather a slow push-and-pull between his conscience and his devotion to his father, with the former slowly gaining ground on the latter. In his later actions we witness the emergence of his humanity from underneath the weight of his father’s influence; Igor, in short, becomes his own man.

La promesse marked a number of “firsts” for Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. Not only was it the first of their films to incorporate the mélange of stylistics devices—handheld camerawork, actual locations, naturalistic acting, and a lack of nondiegetic sound, all directed toward conveying the textures of life at the lower end of the social ladder—but it was also the first of their films to feature Jérémie Renier and Olivier Gourmet, both of whom would go on to play roles in virtually all of their subsequent films. Renier, who was only 14 years old at the time and had never starred in a film before, yet the Dardennes draw from him a captivating central performance that feels captured, rather than performed. Similarly, although Gourmet had only minimal film experience at the time (he had mostly been a stage actor), he provides a powerful screen presence that suggests a paradoxical mixture of the odious and the pathetic. The enormous, thick “welfare glasses” he wears makes his eyes look piggish and distorted, while also underscoring the fact that he is living and operating at the bottom of the social heap. While he exploits, he is also, in some sense, being exploited by those for whom he works. The social world the Dardennes reflect is harsh with mistreatment and cruelty, yet still redeemed by the always evident potential for human decency. La promesse is a film of hard truths, but also of great hope.

Copyright ©2012 James Kendrick

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