This is, to date, the only article I've written to be published in a book...only I didn't know this at the time. I was idly browsing the internet for pieces on the Dardenne brothers, clicked on material from a recently released book, and realised I was reading my own writing. The book in question, Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, was a collection of press and online pieces that had been released some three years previously. I hadn't been asked for permission to publish, nor had I received any notice my work would appear in the book. The editor of the website on which the article appeared said she knew nothing about it. Still, I was pleased. It's been cited in other essays since, sometimes in an amusingly negative manner! It was originally written around 2006.
Two troubling questions raised in recent months…
The first from the BBC4 programme, Lefties, which recalled the golden age of radical TV drama in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Play For Today and other institutions allowed writers the freedom to explore current social problems, often in raw, provocative style, and this freedom spilled over into British cinema where portrayals of the working class became more commonplace. But where are those left-wing polemics now? Where are those works that attacked the status quo in order to make a better world?
And then there is that awkward yet haunting film, Munich. Yes, it’s more liberal hand-wringing from Mr Spielberg, come to tell us about the ills of naughty terrorists and vengeful states. And yet…the insistence on “home”, the way this idea is articulated through meals and the breaking of bread together, and how violence comes to warp and overshadow this most basic of shared pleasures. And the character of Michel Lonsdale, the French paterfamilias, whose home is an idealised portrait of civilised life, but who has become bitter and amoral. And who, over dinner, bemoans the waste of men’s lives to replace “Vichy scum with Gaullist scum” and the concurrent rise of a younger generation stuffed with so-called liberal platitudes learnt from popular culture, not experience. Before we forget Spielberg’s film altogether, let us admit that, in this figure alone, he has created a formidable metaphor of modern Europe, grown cynical in the face of compromise and self-serving on both sides of the political spectrum. In Blair’s Britain, for example, where is the place for the man on the Left who believes in patriotism, heritage and the tradition of beauty? Where the place for the man on the Right who is concerned with human rights and the freedom of speech being slowly but surely eradicated? Where, in short, does the European who falls in the interstices between the vulgar and out-dated concepts of Left and Right find a voice?
The answer to both questions, I believe, lies across the Channel in Belgium – brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. After working in a cement factory to raise money, they began filming strikes and union meetings in the ‘70s, then graduated into documentaries for television. Their first fiction feature Falsch appeared in 1986, but they have said that the first film where they successfully achieved what they wanted was La Promesse (1996). This, and the three films that have followed, have placed them at the apex of modern cinema, and it’s these four works that I’d like to concentrate on.
Let’s start with the titles – The Promise, Rosetta, The Son, The Child. Bold, emphatic, unambiguous. But on closer examination, they yield different interpretations. The Promise is that given by a teenage boy to a dying immigrant worker to look after his wife, but it’s also the promise of a young man being wasted because of his attachment to a father who preys on such immigrants. The Son is a child killed by a joyrider, but the joyrider himself takes his place when he enlists at the father’s carpentry workshop. Rosetta’s name implies that she is a code to be broken, her uncompromising behaviour and marginalised, trailer-trash lifestyle a foreign language for most viewers. And The Child is not so much the baby that a poor couple share, but the unruly, petty criminal father who can blithely sell that child for a quick fix of cash.
Their films bear no little resemblance to British social realism – stories of downtrodden people, on the breadline, inhabiting grim estates and grubby streets. But, at this point, I should admit that I’ve never much cared for that strain of “kitchen sink” drama – the collected works of Ken Leigh and Mike Loach (or is it the other way around?) Why, then, do I rate the Dardennes so highly? Is it just because I want my working-class strife in French accents, the exoticism of another country in place of a Sheffield car park? After all, their plots are only basic melodramas – bad boy makes good, girl realises error of her ways – just as their British counterparts are heart-warming stories of triumph over adversity.
The difference lies in that last title, The Child. Whereas we’re used to the “ignorant folk with a heart of gold”, the Dardennes present a tougher message – that poverty makes children of us all. Their characters are grasping and desperate – ready to betray a friend for a job at a waffle store, ready to sublet their own flat and put their wife and child out of a home. There’s no need to present a caricatured vision of yuppie wealth – a la the landlord in Naked (1993) – or hide the truth of working-class life – that they were among the first to purchase mobile phones and satellite dishes – to make us sympathise with the plight of their protagonists. Leigh and Loach stack the cards in their victims’ favour – they’re made utterly destitute and utterly noble. They don’t challenge their liberal audience but serve up to them their own fantasy of “gritty reality” – in other words, preaching to the converted. But the Dardennes’ is a tough love – it shows that the very systems that the Left rail against make people shrewd, calculating, ruthless. They want the audience to earn their urge to change society by showing people as they really are, not by flattering pre-ordained ideas and mollycoddling them through the film.
In this sense, there’s one British director who is close to them in spirit – Alan Clarke. Clarke’s films are as grim and as gritty as you could wish for, but crucially, they put liberals as much as conservatives on the back foot. By following the fortunes of a racist skinhead (Made In Britain, 1983) or a violent borstal inmate (Scum, 1977,1979) and making them as articulate as their opponents, Clarke, too, forces us to test our views, not indulge them.
And he shares a similar cinematic style with the Dardennes, particularly in the filming of actors. Fascinated by SteadyCam, Clarke found that he could show the antagonism between his characters merely through long tracking shots of them walking, their nervous movement signalling hidden fury. This is translated into the opening of Rosetta where the handheld camera almost chases a young girl down a flight of stairs before having a door slammed in its face. No film starts more urgently, nor intimates so immediately the uncompromising energy of its protagonist. In The Son, Olivier Gourmet is constantly filmed from behind, the bulk of his shoulder filling the screen as the camera tries to peek round at the object of his curiosity.
Throughout the Dardennes’ work, the field of vision is limited. In a genuinely thrilling car chase in The Child, the viewer seldom sees beyond the motorbike of the pursued – there’s no cross-cutting, no exciting overhead shots. The Dardennes do not want us to have any more information than their characters – that way, we are brought into greater empathy with them but we’re also made to see how the deprivations they suffer prevent them from seeing the wider picture. That’s why their stories are not placed in any social context. The urgent necessities of life – food, money – keep them on a merry-go-round of activity that precludes them from the luxuries of debate. Just watching their lives played out as realistically as possible should be enough for the audience to understand their case.
Hardship is signalled through little details – Rosetta using tissue paper to fill the cracks in her caravan window, a father having time to take his child for a walk because the dole queue his wife’s waiting in is so long. Simple metaphors suffice – whenever someone crosses a road, it’s to the “other side”, the margins of society that most of us don’t see, a river shelter or a trailer camp. And there’s no music – even the end credits arrive in stark, black silence. The Dardennes want to factor out anything that doesn’t belong to the story they’re telling, either within or without the narrative. Once the movie is over, there’s no concept of how it might go on afterwards – the off-screen world is not so much unimportant as non-existent. This has led to comparisons with Robert Bresson, who ruthlessly purged his films of what he called “screens”, easy generators of emotion like soundtrack music, baroque camera movement, expressionistic performance. Indeed, the Dardennes have stressed that they share his interest in producing a story with an “economy of means”. But they’ve also admitted that they’ve come to “detest” the comparison because it obscures their own agenda. True, the conclusion of The Child clearly recalls that of Pickpocket (1959) where a young man kisses his girl through the bars of a prison cell. But in Bresson, the focus is on the man’s redemption, a very Catholic sense of grace permeating the endings of his films. But the Dardennes simply show a couple crying and making up before brutally cutting away. There’s no indication that they can or will change, but it’s a more human resolution, the accent being on their mutual affection for each other, not any abstract concept of justice. French critic Nicole Brenez has said of Rosetta that it is “Mouchette today, our Mouchette, the one we deserve, without any heaven and any transcendence.” She says that with an air of despair, but I would argue that this is something positive. The characters are no longer archetypes, trapped into representing a particular concept, but real people. They’re frustrated, often angry, but they’re also warm, boisterous, funny, not the impassive zombies of Bresson’s world. And all they’re trying to do is make a connection.
It’s instructive to make another comparison, this time with a contemporary European filmmaker, Michael Haneke. He, too, offers a superficially ascetic vision of modern Europe, riddled with racism, violence and greed, again framed in silent, black credits. But Haneke’s approach is to observe the action from a distance, a cool objectivity being implied. There is no sense of empathy or closeness with his characters, either in the storylines or use of camera. In other words, he detaches himself from the drama, his absence denying any kind of guiding personality to the film. Some might say this is Haneke’s strength and, indeed, I think he prides himself on his directorial coolness, to the point where he refuses to offer his audience any answers, or intimations of where these answers can be found. But, this way, the filmmaker doesn’t have to get his hands dirty, doesn’t have to wade in and show his hand. It’s as if he sits back, arms folded, as the lights go up, pompously expecting a response from his audience, assuming by implication a position of superiority.
The warmth of the Dardennes, by contrast, comes from the clear identification they have with both their protagonists and the world they inhabit. It’s no surprise to find that they always film in and around local town Seraing, with inexperienced actors or friends, and using stories that they’ve come across in everyday life. Their films feel informed by real experience in much the same way as the documentaries of Humphrey Jennings. Theirs is a new cinema of the Left – still harsh and biting, but infused with a genuine curiosity in human nature and fellow feeling. And it’s a part of a burgeoning movement in film, one that has taken lessons from the old masters like Bresson but planed away their severity to produce a softer but no less committed humanism. Think of Nuri Bilge Ceylan in Turkey, whose Uzak (2002) pays homage to Tarkovsky and Kiarostami, yet brings their style home to a simple tale of two cousins who can’t get on. Or in the UK, and admittedly at a lower level of achievement, Shane Meadows’ A Room For Romeo Brass (1999) which brings us back to where we came in, the “kitchen sink” drama, but done with freshness, vigour and a pleasing lack of portentousness. It’s a new kind of cinema for a new kind of Europe.