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Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s La Promesse is that rare thing, a coming-of-age drama that carries real moral weight without seeming ponderous and transforms a hot political topic into flesh-and-bone drama.
The story introduces us to Igor (Jeremie Renier), a fifteen-year-old Belgian boy who’s forced to live a double life in the stark industrial suburb of Seraing, on the bank of the Meuse River. He is at once a vaguely baffled teenager tinkering with his go-cart and hanging out with friends, and the right-hand man to his father, Roger (Olivier Gourmet), a lout who smuggles undocumented Africans, Croats and Turks into the country, rigs their work papers and exploits them at every turn. Five to a room. Pay the gas bill before you get heat. Fermez la bouche.
This latter-day slavery is one of the scandals of Western Europe (not to mention the recent discovery of a New York sweatshop crammed with deaf Mexican immigrants), and it’s high time filmmakers like the Seraing-born Dardenne brothers–documentarians for the last twenty years–made something of it. What they’ve made of it is one of the most authentic and moving films of the year.
For Igor, a handsome blond kid suspended between boys’ games and the ambiguities of manhood as he bravely fires up a cigarette or slugs on a beer, the conflict is overwhelming. He’s divided between loyalty to (and fear of) his frequently abusive father and the first stirrings of guilt about his father’s cruelty–and the sort of legacy he might inherit.
Igor’s personal crisis begins when a Ghanaian illegal named Amidu (Rasmane Ouedraogo) falls from a scaffold and is badly injured. Rather than seek help and risk exposure, Roger lets the man die and buries the body in fresh concrete at the building site. But first Amidu asks young Igor to help his wife and infant son.
Thus the title of La Promesse and its crucial turning point. Dispassionately but relentlessly, the Dardennes show us a conscience and a consciousness in the making: Igor comes to see Assita (Assita Ouedraogo), the willful widow of the dead man, not as a commodity or a nuisance, as his father does, but as a human being with yearnings and desires. When her baby gets sick, Igor takes them to the hospital. When a thug comes around to collect a gambling debt, Igor fixes it. He sells his gold ring at the pawnshop to help and even comes to grasp that Assita’s belief in fortune-telling is not some barbarian quirk but a pathway beyond the box he’s been living in.
The final challenge to self and soul, of course, is to defy Pere once and for all. Just as colonized nations must defy their oppressors, just as every son has to one day seize the mantle of responsibility, Igor must awaken and face the moment that will define him forever.
The Dardenne brothers chronicle this primal drama quietly, straightforwardly and without much adornment–as the best of the Italian neo-realists might have done. La Promesse is all the better for that choice, a powerful, clear-eyed film that speaks directly to the heart as it confronts a rough issue.–Gallo
La Promesse.
Written and directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. With Jeremie Renier, Olivier Gourmet, Assita Ouedraogo and Rasmane Ouedraogo.
