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The Quality of Mercy
Chroniclers of the mundane, champions of
the meek and dispossessed, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne make
movies of intimidating purity. Three features into their
fiction film career, the brothers have constructed a
distinctive universe of proletarian woe and unanticipated
redemption. Le Fils (The Son), their latest dip
into miserablist waters, is as much a reiteration as an
elaboration of the brothers' preoccupations. Shuffled to the
background are the blatant polemics of their previous film,
Rosetta (1999); more pronounced is a moving strain of
Christian faith.
The Dardennes do not so much construct a fiction as
document an unraveling episode in an unexamined life. As with
Rosetta and their debut, La Promesse (1997),
they plunge the audience into the story unceremoniously.
Perfectly plain behind thick glasses and a scowl, Olivier
(played by Dardenne regular Olivier Gourmet) is a carpentry
teacher at a vocational school for juvenile delinquents. Shot
mostly from behind and up close, Olivier is an agitated
subject at the outset. Playing the gruff mentor to his wayward
flock, he moves briskly, spitting out curt instructions and
stern reproaches.
The movie takes its time explaining itself. Narrative
information and expository signposts are withheld early on.
Exacerbating the disorientation is the Dardennes' rigorous
naturalism, which relies on verit?style camerawork. (You
wouldn't need a bio to inform you that the brothers worked in
documentaries for years.) That the focus of its volatile gaze
is a cipher makes Le Fils all the more obscure. By the
time the movie's themes snap into focus, a good thirty minutes
have already passed.
The catalyst of this parable arrives in the form of Francis
(Morgan Marinne), a new student in Olivier's class -- and a
presence that unaccountably harries the stolid carpenter. Just
as puzzling to the dazed viewer is Olivier's reaction to his
ex-wife's news that she will soon have a baby: why, he asks
her, did she tell him today of all days? Soon enough, his
fixation on the student is explained: it turns out Francis is
the boy who killed his own child years earlier. What Olivier
chooses to do with the knowledge becomes the stuff of this
movie's peculiar suspense.
Of course, to call the
Dardennes' movie "suspenseful," with
its suggestion of genre expectations, almost seems like a
diminution of its singular qualities. Le Fils evinces
the same disregard for plot and convention as their other
movies. When events unfold, they seem to transpire
organically: character and circumstance, rather than
expedience and authorial whim, drive the narrative. A
recurring image -- patient shots of people thinking -- gets at
what makes their movies so compelling. Since nothing is
predetermined, epiphanies feel genuinely new, and the twisted
paths that lead to them unexpectedly gripping.
Unfailingly disciplined, the Dardennes resist glib payoffs
and easy answers. Gourmet's tour-de-force performance (for
which he won a best actor prize at Cannes last year) never
begs for sympathy: even as Olivier's behavior becomes more
comprehensible, his intentions remain cloudy, right down to
the messy climax. His motivations are also a puzzle to his ex
(Isabella Soupart). "Nobody would do this," she shrieks when
she finds out he has taken Francis under his wing. "I know,"
he replies, neatly turning reproof into redemption.
Such scenes are never flagged for their momentousness. The
downscaling of grand moral conundrums is of a piece with the
Dardennes' larger project. Like their other works, Le
Fils is devoted to the minutiae of daily life. Much
attention is lavished on the tedious substance of Olivier's
workday. As he goes about his business, it becomes apparent
that the trivial is epic to the filmmakers. In showing people
at work or in deep thought, the Dardennes accord the same
respect for the simple and commonplace that a century of
movies have showered on flashier, prettier things.
Whether this is hubris or humility is for the viewer to
decide. Rich with ideas and emotion though it is, Le
Fils is almost perversely austere. ("Why would anyone want
to see work when I go to the movies to get away from work?"
moaned one friend.) Perpetually overcast, the movie offers
little respite from its lugubrious scenario. Viewers prone to
seasickness -- and I raise my sheepish hand here -- might also
be in for a long night: the handheld camerawork is as
turbulent as Olivier's conscience.
For all its wallowing in quotidian gloom, Le Filsis
infused with religious feeling. As if Olivier's vocation were
not enough to tip you off, the movie ends in a lumberyard,
where Olivier and Francis lug pieces of wood over their
shoulders -- a figurative march to Calvary. Concerned with
questions of forgiveness and acceptance, Le Fils shuns
the cathartic pyrotechnics of Todd Field's In the
Bedroom (2001). Ending their movie with an unannounced act
of decency, the Dardennes take their resolutely earthbound
movie to a rarefied place.