the promise (jean-pierre dardenne & luc dardenne)

It might be that I owe an apology to Jérémie Renier. Not that he’d be interested. When I give my class on directing actors at the film school (and what do I know?) I use one of his performances as an example of an actor being poorly directed. I always stress that Renier is a fine actor, and it’s not his fault that in this particular film he’s off the pace, its down to the direction, but nonetheless, there’s a small generation of aspiring filmmakers in Montevideo who will forever associate him with this example of how not to do it. As I say, this is always stressing that this is an actor capable of great things, and indeed in a joint class given with Javier Olivera, we also showed him excelling in a Dardenne brothers movie to emphasise the contrast between an actor well directed and an actor poorly directed.

All of which meant, when I realised about ten minutes in that the child who is the protagonist of The Promise was none other than a very youthful Renier, with his foppish blond locks and impish charm, it made me smile. Because he displays an innate brilliance in this early film of the Dardenne brothers. The brothers at their best have a mastery of the simplest elements of drama: a sympathetic hero(ine) put in a place of moral compromise, who has to realise a quest to redeem themselves. The premise of The Promise is at once straightforward and mesmerising. Can Igor free himself from the tyrannical hold of his desperate father, Roger (also brilliantly played with a mixture of canniness, greed and stupidity by Olivier Gourmet). All of this set in a world of immigration which the film shows was just as pressing an issue twenty years ago as it is today. 

The film manages to combine great flair in its camerawork and edit, with something so down-to-earth that it really feels at times as though you’re there, in this Belgian backwater. The restless energy of the camera, allied to the energy of the performances (including that of Assita Ouedraogo as Assita) gives the film an urgency which entraps the viewer. People are always moving in this film, in a combi van across an urban landscape, in a go-kart, or striding the night streets. The restless forces of a globalised capitalism on the march, captured in the bewilderment and moral complexity of a young man’s growing understanding of the world he lives in.