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La Promesse
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Some prominent careers in cinema get obscured by the passage of time and the vagaries of exhibition/distribution. When I first saw La Promesse at the Rotterdam Film Festival of ’97, I (like many) thoughtlessly assumed it was the debut feature of the Dardennes – simply because I had never encountered their work, or any mention of it, previously. But La Promesse is far from their first film – there is almost two decades of prolific documentary work before that. It’s not even their first fiction feature; both Falsch (1987) and Je pense à vous (1992) precede it – but there are (as of 2025) no Wikipedia entries in English for those efforts. There is no doubt, however, that La Promesse ‘launched’ the Dardennes on a trajectory they are still faithfully following today, almost 30 years on. It is a riveting and haunting film. And it raises itself above the standard-issue ‘social issue’ drama, and even the versions of that form delivered from the UK by Ken Loach or Mike Leigh – via the intensity of its staging and execution, and the singularity or specificity of its approach. On every viewing, for instance, I am seized by the extraordinary physical, mental and emotional stress registered on, in and through its central character – a combustion of pressures accumulating, in agonising quasi-real-time sequences, from both inside and outside the person. La Promesse is somewhat reminiscent of Boaz Yakin’s Fresh (1994) in its evocation of a teenage boy, Igor (Jérémie Renier), silently negotiating his way through the mean streets of an amoral, criminal milieu. But things are harder, messier, more tearing, more steeped in compromise and contradiction – it is a true drama. The film ends up taking its rightful place among the cinema’s most telling, compassionate and morally complex portraits of childhood and adolescence – specifically, Roberto Rossellini’s war-time classics, such as Germany, Year Zero (1948) but also, uncanonised, Robert Duvall’s Angelo My Love (1983). Caught between two promises – the promise to Amidou (Rasmane Ouedraogo), a dying African immigrant, to look after his wife (Assita Ouedraogo) and small child; and the promise to his father Roger (Olivier Gourmet) to keep this same man’s death a secret – Igor’s painful journey to the toughest of resolutions is a remarkable parable of human bondedess, responsibility and community in our multi-racial, multi-cultural time. Igor: promised to all, dashing about frantically, already a nervous wreck, losing his job as an apprentice due to his commitment to Roger – and trying desperately, all the while, to hold together the painfully fragile status quo. The way he ‘tends’ to Assita is by awkwardly hanging around her, clumsily intervening in unfolding situations … and telling lies always, in tiny or extravagant ways. (It’s an amazing portrait of the tension involved in maintaining a lie, despite everything.) Meanwhile, Assita is hardly friendly toward the boy, or accepting of his strange advances. Indeed, her very final look to him declares only: ‘So, this is what you did. And now I know about it. So, I’m walking away. Do as you see fit – go away, or come along with me’. It is also a story with a mythic reference at its centre: Chronos, who eats his young. The Dardennes put much emphasis – and make a questionably moralistic point – on the ‘unseemly’ intimacy of father and son in this tale: they’re more like homosocial pub pals than parent and child, thus leaving Igor without an appropriate ‘role model’. (Note that, alongside this too-present father, there is also an almost entirely absent mother, who intervenes only once and simply exits when summarily dismissed: the elemental family structure is entirely missing.) What is beyond doubt, however, is that Igor must break away, eventually but decisively, from the malign influence of his shifty Dad. Hence the indelible scene of literally chaining the parent up in order for the child to flee … The Dardennes always begin from a keenly observed social reality, in order to end up – this is part of their debt to the Robert Bresson of Mouchette (1967), especially – at not exactly a transcendental, but certainly an elevated plane. Collective politics (as documented in that earlier, less-seen phase of their career) is whittled down to symbolic dramas of individual resistance, refusal, committed position-taking. It’s a perfectly valid choice within the wide prism of political cinemas. The drama is moral, in a register that one can only describe as moral suspense. Within it, there is an admirable quality of characterisation. Roger is a fascinating figure, for instance. In so many ways, he’s the bad guy, the villain – someone in the Rotterdam audience cheered when the Igor’s potential revenge on Roger loomed as a gratifying pay-off. But La Promesse doesn’t work that way at all. What one critic called “the immediacy of the impulse” applies to every central figure, including Roger: so much of what he does is inappropriate, and also likely manipulative – micro-managing and double-binding his son with love and matey comradeship so as to secure his silence – but it’s also simply his raw feeling, his instinct, his way of doing things and staying alive. He’s not a sadist or a pervert. He does the illegal work in his tawdry, exploitative enterprise, collects the money and gets things done – but he treats his black workers with no undue racism, meanness or savagery. And he really does love his son, palpably so. The stylistic attack of the Dardennes is fascinating, and potently mixed. It has a kitchen-sink-realist side (the Loach/Leigh reference). A messy, chaotic, right-in-there, immersive aspect (Cassavetes/Pialat, some Nick Gomez, or later the Safdies), with (as they have attested) an emphasis on overall rhythm and momentum rather than pictorial beauty or ugliness. That real-time, stuck-in-the-middle, panic factor. The Bressonian concentration on bodily details: hands exchanging objects, napes of necks tracked in incessant follow-shots. Yet these shots never merely follow (i.e., mechanically record) in a functional fashion: they heighten, include or exclude, inscribe, actively figure. In the mid ‘90s context, there was also in the air – more or less forgotten today as an intertext – the briefly fashionable Dogme mania, with the Dardennes seeming to follow (although it was not their guiding intention) the ‘laws’ set out jokily (and adhered to for scarcely a decade) by Lars von Trier and his comrades: handheld camerawork, direct recording, no imposed, ‘external’ music score (which “makes viewers go blind”, as the Belgian brothers remarked). Ultimately, the Dardennes hold to a more poetic vocation. “The problem is not painting life, but creating a living painting … That’s what the cinema is to me: how to incarnate the invisible, how to incarnate the phantom” – such statements fill the spoken statements and diaristic writings of Luc Dardenne (see his invaluable On the Back of Our Images (1991-2005) Vol. 1 from Featherproof). A more theoretical bent is revealed in such slightly gnomic remarks as: “Ethics is an optics, but not a plastics”. How to parse that one? Ethics is an optics: invoked here is the ‘phantom’ of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), whose philosophy of the face-to-face encounter has been plumbed extensively in relation to the brothers’ work (and at times too literally, as pure one-to-one illustration of a concept) by the film-philosophy movement of the 21st century. But not a plastics: this is the more enduring and generative notion. I interpret it as a reflection on the drive and need to avoid easy stereotyping (of personality, class status, national identity, and so on), to ‘go to the end’ of a person (Jean-Claude Carrière’s term) in the depiction of their often unpredictable, surprising actions. The tremendous physicality generated by the Dardennes’ films is phenomenal, not epiphenomenal, i.e., it’s not a just a side-effect of their general shooting method. Unlike in Dogme, improvisation is not the order of their day; every move, every gesture is rigorously preplanned and rehearsed with cast and crew. Everything must be expressed in physical terms (since – cine-philosophy principle – everything internal can only be conveyed by external, visible signs): actions, gestures, daily rituals (such as food preparation), the handling of props, artisanal professions … This physical regime spans conscious labour and unconscious symptomatology: the realm of the somatic, of the unplanned impulse (how Igor hurls himself desperately, in a key moment, at Assita), of sudden tears and cries and personal-armour cracks … La Promesse is among those very affecting movies – direct, literal (for the most part), unadorned – that undoubtedly takes us and and its central characters on a journey … only it’s difficult to say precisely what that journey has been, what truth has been exactly revealed. We don’t know what has been learned … by anybody (thus, the total opposite of contemporary Hollywood convention). But that truth must have something to do with a profound, binding, searing commitment to otherness understood in all its senses (philosophical, cultural, racial, human). The debt that builds up for Igor in relation to Assita demands a deepening complicity – it takes him all the way from initial, distant voyeurism (his puzzlement at her native ways, including the mystical-magical element) to total, unspoken attachment at the end. And what an ending it is! The superb final shot in the train station tunnel: Igor’s simple act of running up alongside her, without uttering a word, accompanying her – and the train sound over the final credits matching the garage sound of the start. It matters less than ever to wonder (or ask the filmmakers at festival q&a time): beyond the cut to black, what happens next? More decisive (and genuinely Bressonian) is the Dardennes’ ability to surround and capture the move, the change to a new way of thinking and feeling … the type of move that alters one’s life irrevocably. *** 2025 Retrospect. The fate (so far) of the Dardennes on the film festival, arthouse and general cinephilic/critical circuit of taste and judgement traces a strange and fascinating trajectory. In 1997, La Promesse stunned me and, not long after, Rosetta (1999) registered as a masterpiece of contemporary cinema. I then loyally stuck with the brothers through The Son (2002), The Child (2005) and Lorna’s Silence (2008) – even if some internal fractures in their ‘method’ (such as the suppression of backstory until the absolute last possible moment) were showing here and there. At the point of The Kid with a Bike (2011), however, I began to disengage from their work – and for quite a few other cinephiles, the cool-off had started earlier. I struggled to maintain my interest across Two Days, One Night (2014), The Unknown Girl (2016) and Young Ahmed (2019), and I have not yet bothered to catch up with Tori and Lokita (2022). (As I write, their Young Mothers has been announced for Cannes 2025.) What happened? To a certain extent, it was a problem of repetition, of an auteur-template too faithfully adhered to by these creators; quite simply, every new film seemed more or less the same as all the others, with predictable patterns and diminishing affects. The same turnabouts, the same revelations, the same moral suspense and abiding mysteries of personality … But was this an all-too-typical case of the burnout (on the filmmakers’ part) or ennui (on the spectators’ part) nurtured by the unforgiving film festival cycle? Is the ennui reaction a problem of perception, i.e., do we need to get out of the framework of that festival cycle to now (re)see the films clearly? (After all, we hardly care, in hindsight, that John Ford, Mizoguchi or Bresson made basically the same film year in and year out.) I don’t yet have a solid (‘objective’) opinion on this – and I suspect few critics do. In this regard, the Dardennes join a long list of Yesterday’s Heroes, directors rapidly turned over and spat out of the arthouse (including Wong Kar-wai) in dizzy transitions of the touted Zeitgeist. It’s a cruel world! And the Dardennes’ situation fell under a particularly vicious axe: the rise and rise of Pedro Costa, whose films (on roughly similar topics and terrains) are frequently wielded as the good-radical/hyper-ethical alternative to the crowd-flattering, ‘easy’ social dramas of the brothers. (How they somehow plummeted from exigent to easy within barely a decade is an enigma which only the Sphinx of the Zeitgeist can answer.) And the Costa Comparison is another lens which, in all likelihood, now needs cleaning, if not outright shoving. What was it the Dardennes said, probably 20 years ago now? “Our question is not: will the spectator love the film? But – the film, will it love the spectator?” Film culture, at its worst, tends to make that determination impossible. This text includes material derived from my 2006 DVD audio commentary on La Promesse, released as The Promise by Madman (Australia) in March 2007. As no reviewer has ever noted (they may not have listened this far in), it is the only audio commentary on which I sing! © Adrian Martin January & March 1997 / November 2006 / March 2025 |
