• La Promesse (The Promise )

7/8/22 (Fri)

The Dardenne brothers’ breakout film of 1996. Igor is a teenaged kid in an industrial Belgian town who helps his slimy father Roger in the “family business” trafficking illegal immigrants. Roger uses his rotting property to hide the migrants, mainly from Eastern Europe and Africa (though a Korean surprisingly appears in the mix as well – what is he escaping from??), and secures them resident cards in exchange for working for him for a pittance, even charging them rent. He is not above lying and turning a few into the police on occasion to keep the authorities out of his hair. His charges mean nothing to him other than the illicit money he can wring out of them, and his treatment of them reflects that.

Igor’s relationship with his father is exploitative as well as the latter constantly pulls his son from his apprentice work at a mechanic, making it impossible for the boy to develop new skills, in order to carry out new ways of taking advantage of the migrants. The boy has developed a fairly hard shell, dealing with the illegal immigrants dispassionately despite their clear hardships. He occasionally hangs out with his own friends, sharing cigarettes and building a go-cart, but his life is dominated by the father’s needs. The father is not entirely unloving – he offers the boy booze and cigarettes and even offers to get him laid (they have a nice karaoke scene together at a bar) – but the son’s needs are always second to his own.

One day, one of the immigrants panics when the authorities raid the place and falls off a scaffolding, severely injuring himself. The father, fearing exposure, refuses to take him to a hospital and effectively lets him die. The man begs Igor to take care of his wife and infant, newly arrived from Burkino Faso, and promptly passes on. The father buries the body in back and orders Igor not to tell the wife what happened. The remainder of the film deals with the moral dilemma faced by the boy, who suddenly has to deal with the African wife as a human being. He is torn between his refusal to rat on his father and his guilt in allowing the woman to believe that her husband will eventually return.

The father concocts several schemes to get rid of the woman to avoid trouble, including staging an attempted rape (from which he heroically saves her) to highlight the danger of her life there. He finally comes up with a fake telegram suggesting that her husband is waiting for her in Germany. As she prepares for her journey, the conflicted boy must decide whether to compromise his conscience and stay quiet or defy his father and tell her the truth.

The film has a documentary feel at times – the sibling directors were former documentary makers – with the use of hand-held cameras and some actors who are clearly not pros. It doesn’t feel scripted at first, the story only taking shape once the immigrant dies. The film succeeds in humanizing the immigrants, even showing the wife literally getting peed on in the streets. Of course, it avoids asking just why it is so hard for Belgians to view them as individuals in the first place, which is related to the vast number of such illegals that swarm the system. But that’s not the film’s concern. It is less about immigrants in any case than the boy’s coming of age in dealing with a deep ethical question. As in the later Young Ahmed, the Belgian boy here lacks one parent, in this case a mother, and thus a moral compass, which he must discover on his own. His ultimate decision leads to a strange and inconclusive ending that resolves nothing, almost as if the directors simply ran out of ideas. But the journey is highly satisfying.

Jérémie Renier is a natural as Igor, bearing not a little resemblance to the boy in The 400 Blows. His underplayed portrayal is extremely effective. But it is Olivier Gourmet as Roger who dominates the film with his no-holds-barred portrayal of the ever-scheming father who uses everyone and everything to his own ends and never looks further than the situation in front of him. The role could easily have gone over-the-top in an evil villain way, but Gourmet gives a true-to-life performance that hardly feels like acting. Manipulating and despicable, but impossible to look away from – great performance. While others are not in that league, the entire film felt like it was shot on the run rather than crafted, and that’s not a complaint. A fascinating and thoughtful film.