young ahmed (jean-pierre & luc dardenne)

You know exactly what you’re going to get with the Dardenne Brothers. You’re going to get a well-crafted movie dealing with social issues. Which is exactly what Young Ahmed delivers. Instantly, the efficiency of the storytelling grabs the viewer. Simple scenes with little flannel, told from the protagonist’s perspective, which present their portrayal of the film’s eponymous protagonist. No great science. Ahmed with his family. Ahmed at the mosque. Ahmed with the teacher who will become the focus for the conflict within the film. Ahmed commits the action which changes his life.

The trouble with the efficiency of this approach is that it runs the risk of feeling more about the way in which stories are presented than the issue the story seeks to present. In the case of Young Ahmed, whilst the representation of his ablutions and prayers felt urgent and necessary, the viewer comes away with little insight into the issue of the clash between the Muslim world and the West and the associated desire for Jihad which Ahmed has somehow accrued. We see an adolescent in crisis, as we might see in many a Dardenne movie, but the specific crux of his crisis, the aforementioned conflict, feels as nebulous at the film’s end as it did at the start. A few grainy moments of an on-line video and the mutterings of a manipulative mullah don’t quite seem to explain how Ahmed has become so disconnected from his society that he can now carry a burning desire to kill in the name of Allah.

Some might say that the Dardenne Brothers, white males, don’t have a right to tell Ahmed’s story, that it is a form of colonialism in itself. This writer doesn’t hold to that, stories belong to everyone and representation matters, no matter how it gets to the screen. But Young Ahmed does leave one questioning the issue of the formula as a storytelling mechanism. The Dardenne brothers have a formula, which works effectively within the constraints of cinematic narrative (90 minutes, two dimensional etc). But when a film starts to feel formulaic, it strips the blood from the body and what is left is in danger of seeming robotic.