La Promesse is one of the early feature films by the Belgian Dardenne brothers. Even so, their distinctive approach to cinema is here fully developed: their meticulous attention to locations and their emphasis on moral ambivalence is strongly present. The existential problems of the main characters are vividly evoked by describing their lived situation. Like few other directors (there is Bresson, of course), the Dardennes' sense of reality is primarily moral - and morality is not reduced to thin concepts of good/evil, right/wrong, but, rather, a plethora of perspectives of deceit, truth, friendship, trust, family and many others.
The protagonist, Igor is a teenager working for his father in a construction business, but he dreams of becoming a mechanic. The people his dad hires are illegal immigrants who live in a house nearby. Roger, the father, is described as a man who tries to earn money from this business, and he does not hesitate to demand high rents from the immigrants. Still, he is not depicted as greedy. We get the sense that he, too, belongs to the working class and tries to make ends meet. But this does not take the edge of his cruelty. One day, there is an accident. A man is killed on the construction site and governmental inspectors of the place are about to arrive. Before the man dies, he talks to Igor and makes him promise to look after his wife & kid. Father and son buries the man in cement, and keep quiet.
The 'promise' is the moral center of the film. What do we do when we promise? What kind of action is it, what makes a promise a promise? The kid continues to work for his father, who places many demands on him, but Igor also tries to help the wife of the dead man. I don't think it would be right to describe the boy as being torn between, for example, two principles or rules. It makes more sense to describe the relations between him and his father, along with the way he is haunted by his conscience. The father manipulates and exploits the workers, and his son longs for his affection, while also being abhorred by his cruelty. Igor simply cannot resist helping the woman. It makes a difference in what spirit the boy is doing this. It makes a difference for what we take the promise to be. We see him vacillate, and even try to send the wife away. He has not been able to tell her about the death of her husband, and is consequently complicit in lies about what has happened. Even when we see him and his father doing very horrible things, we look at this from the point of view of moral struggle. The confrontation between father and son is a climax of emotions and actions that, even though they might seem extra-ordinary, are rooted in familiar desperation.
If I would read the script for La Promesse I would perhaps find it overwrought, its story too constructed. The same thing can be said about many of the Dardennes' films, I suspect. Somehow, I never get this reaction when I watch their movies. They make me see the urgency in a specific moral situation, its different temporal stretches: we see the characters wrestling with choices and we also see in which way this is grounded in the past and in which ways it has implications for the open-ended future. The Dardennes situate their story in a socio-economic context but it should be said that this is no mere 'context'. Their reflections on class, poverty and exploitation is interwoven with the moral quandries. This is what I think make their films truly great: there is no division between 'characters' and 'surroundings' - these are organically linked in the moral universe of the film.
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