La Promesse (1996)

Igor's father Roger rents his ramshackle flats to illegal immigrants as part of an organized smuggling operation. His exploitation includes offering some with reduced rent to work construction on his building. When inspectors come for a surprise visit, an illegal worker falls to his death. With his dying breath, the worker asks Igor to care for his baby and wife Assita. Igor helps his father hide the dead body. Roger intends to trick Assita but Igor intervenes.Jérémie Renier is a newcomer teenager here. The role is terribly juicy. He tries his best but he may not be prepared. Also Assita Ouedraogo may not be a professional actress but she does have a realism. This is a devastating story. The Dardenne brothers bring a documentary realism. At the same time, they don't necessarily have the skills to bring out superior acting from their actors.

I was loving this movie until about halfway through, when Assita told Igor that the sheep she'd bought wasn't to provide milk for her baby but for "the Festival of Sacrifice". That's when I hit STOP and ditched the DVD.I'm supposed to sympathize with this "young widow" (as the synopsis describes her), when she bought a sweet, gentle creature just so she can kill it to satisfy some demonic bloodthirsty "god", or whatever? I assume that's what the chicken is for, too. Why did those people even bother sneaking into Belgium if they intended to bring their barbaric customs with them? Why didn't they just stay in Africa?Since the movie hinges on Igor's sympathy for her, there's no point in my waiting around to see if they actually show the slaughter, because I already couldn't care less what happens to that woman. I liked some of the Dardennes' later movies a lot, but if I'd seen this one first I never would have bothered with the others.I know every single person who reads this review will mark it "Not useful", with a warm surge of righteous artistic indignation (and even more righteous anti-American indignation when they see where I'm writing from) as they click the No button.Good for you. You're a great champion of free artistic expression and the rights of the world's downtrodden masses - as long as the views being expressed agree with yours and the downtrodden masses are human beings and not innocent defenseless animals. Your world loves you, but I don't have to.

Brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne concern themselves with creating films that put realism on the screen without using artifice or cinematic trickery to distract the audience from the socially aware message at the core of their narratives. Unlike the similarly themed dogme movement, or the more iconic works of Lars von Trier etc, the Dardenne brothers are unconcerned with changing the face of cinematic reality, but rather, take their cue from people like Ken Loach, Bruno Dumont and Robert Bresson; by creating honest, often-bleak works of film that take their character from despair, to hope, and sometimes, right back to despair, in order to give the audience a taste of a world away from the more comfortable social milieu we might be accustomed to. The concept could be read as hypocritical admittedly, and although the occasional heavy-handed quality of the brother's work does intermittently become preachy, there is ample opportunity to deliver some moments of earth-shattering drama.I first encountered the Dardenne's work back in 2001, when British film channel Film Four premiered their film The Promise (1996) in preparation for the premier of their highly acclaimed follow up film Rosetta (1999). Both films are here are heavily indebted to the naturalistic/realist work of Bresson and Loach, particularly films like Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Riff Raff (1990) and Raining Stones (1993); with the filmmakers presenting the viewer with a series of characters continually forced to the brink of despair, but desperate to pull themselves back. For me, out of the two films of theirs that I have thus far seen, The Promise is the one that makes the greatest impact. Here, The Dardenne's create a world that isn't a million miles away from the current social climate in the UK, with building sites, smoky pubs and migrant workers peppering what is essentially the typical rites-of-passage/coming of age movie so familiar even by Hollywood standards. The brothers rest their narrative firmly on the shoulders of young newcomer Jérémie Rénier as Igor, a teenage tearaway forced into looking after a young black mother and her baby following the death of the woman's husband whilst working for the company run by Igor's father.The brothers season their film with an abundance of topical, moralistic issues such as the passage into adulthood, immigration and domestic abuse, but at the centre of the drama there is still room for hope in the touching father son relationship between Igor and his disparate dad (played here by award winning actor and regular Dardenne collaborator Olivier Gourmet). The Promise might not be a ground-breaking film; its ideas are well worn and its scenarios familiar from the classic kitchen-sink cinema of films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and A Taste of Honey (1961) to name only two, but the process of refinement that the brothers are able to create with the subtle shading of characters and the no-nonsense approach to film-making is really quite affecting on the most personal and emotional of levels.

"La Promesse", from the makers of "Rosetta", is an award winning drama which gets down to business quickly. The film is shot with no frills and the hard edge of a documentary. It tells of a father and son, both of questionable character, who make their living on the backs of transient illegal aliens in Belgium and the schism which developes between them as they engage a serious matter of conscience. Viewers with an appetite for reality in film will extol this flick while fantasy lovers may hate its grit.