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.

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.

the silence of lorna (w&d jean-pierre & luc dardenne)

The Dardenne brothers are figures who float at the edge of the Anglo-Saxon consciousness. Occasionally fashionable, a film of theirs will be feted, before they're forgotten again. The Silence of Lorna hasn't generated much critical acclaim, but in some small way it seems as though their films are an event, as filmmakers they're worth checking out no matter what they're doing. Not a state that can be sustained indefinitely - pace Allen and even Scorsese - but The Silence of Lorna suggests that the brothers are near the top of the game, and if this was a weekly review of note rather than an unsung warble from the blogoshpere I'd be beseeching as many readers as possible to go and see it.

The film is Lorna's story. Played with a restraint which is the all the more impressive for those brief moments, crucial to the narrative, when it's broken, by Arta Dobroshi. Lorna features in just about every scene in the film. She's an immigrant, who has settled in Belgium, and married Claudy, a hopeless junkie, in order to get her visa. This is part of a deal whereby she will marry a rich Russian following the end of her marriage to Claudy, after which she will finally get to settle down with her sweetheart, Sokol. Together they plan to open a cafe, and you kind of know that Lorna possesses the drive and the nerve to make it work, to become a 21st century success story of the globalised world.

There's only one hitch, which is that the fixer of the deal, Fabio, has decided the safest thing for everyone is if Claudy has an 'accidental' overdose and dies. No matter what the harsh realities of life dictate, and in spite of the fact their marriage is a sham, Lorna can't come to terms with this. When Claudy decides to quit heroin,  he turns to Lorna for help, and she can't help but provide it. She tries to fix a divorce instead, and, when Claudy's on the point of regressing back to drugs, she sleeps with him. After Claudy dies of an overdose, arranged by Fabio, Lorna realises or decides she's pregnant, and in spite of the fact she knows its going to fuck everything up, she refuses to have an abortion.

It's a simple tale, and classic storytelling. The neo-realist filming style, as plain and unadorned as can be, contributes to the narrative's believability. In another context the story might be melodramatic, but in this one, and told this way, it feels like a report from the front line of the global village, where the simple act of choosing to keep a child can become one of almost absurd courage. Lorna's insistence of preserving her humanity in spite of the price she will have to pay for it is heroic, and leads to a denouement containing a whole forest full of tension.

The directors succeed in coaxing a remarkable performance from Dobroshi, as well as from Jeremie Renier as Claudy. The film's simplicity is its strength. The Silence of Lorna is a film made in the image of its heroine: discovering a sense of value in what lies beneath the surface, in spite of the world's constant seeking of value in what can be seen on the surface alone.