Today, though, he’s most excited to be talking about the brothers’ new work, “The Son,” the third in a loose trilogy of social-realist films that take place in the economically depressed mining town of Seraing, where the brothers grew up, 10 minutes outside Liege. It’s the story of Olivier, a lonely, reticent man with thick glasses (played by the talented but emphatically unglamorous Olivier Gourmet), who teaches carpentry to troubled teens in a reform school. His ex-wife is remarried by now and pregnant. Soon we learn that their small son was killed five years earlier–and that the murderer, Francis (Morgan Marinne, in his first acting role), now 16, is one of Olivier’s charges at the school. Francis is meek, barely literate, from a broken home and looking for parental figures. He’s quietly deferential to the burly, knowing Olivier–all the teens are–but he doesn’t know that the carpenter knows who he is, and what horrible act he’s committed.
The Biblical allusions are plenty. But the Dardennes, lapsed Roman Catholics both, got the idea for the script from the well-publicized 1994 murder of toddler Jamie Bulger in England by two adolescents. They were also moved by Gourmet himself, who appeared in two of their earlier films. “We promised ourselves to put Olivier at the center of a film,” says Jean-Pierre, 51, three years older than Luc. “We were really inspired by his mysterious and enigmatic personality. Voila.” So were the judges at Cannes, who awarded Gourmet the best-actor award at the festival last year for his role. This year “The Son” will be Belgium’s entry for the best foreign-film Oscar.
The entire movie is shot with a handheld camera–but without any of the other pretensions of the Dogma 95 manifesto. There’s no music and little dialogue. Yet the story unfolds with perfect pacing, slowly, warily, building to a tension that becomes almost unbearable. Will Olivier confront Francis? Will tragedy repeat itself? The film tackles these questions without ever turning nihilistic.
The Dardenne brothers have built a career out of making difficult or depress-ing subjects uplifting. Their 1996 film “La Promesse” deals with illegal immigration in the heart of a gentrifying Europe. “Rosetta,” about a young woman living in a trailer park and desperate for a job, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1999. But the brothers came late to feature films; they started in 1987 with “Falsch,” adapted from a play about the Holocaust, then made “Je Pense a Vous” in 1992, about a steelworker who loses his job–and his taste for life. It was a critical and commercial failure. “We missed the boat completely,” says Jean-Pierre, lowering his voice for the first time. “We took ourselves too seriously, as in ‘Now we are filmmakers’.”
Before that, they made documentaries, dozens of them, pieces that would later inform their fiction. Their first series, from the mid-1970s, were video portraits of residents of low-income housing projects in the region of Wallonia, which they screened publicly in these developments “to let people know there were others in the community worth knowing,” says Jean-Pierre. Eventually their work was shown at the Montbeliard Video Festival in France, just when the video scene was beginning to percolate. Finally, after documenting various labor movements, strikes and immigrant stories, they made the slow move into features. They have no regrets about waiting so long to make the switch. “We never really thought that way, and I don’t think it’s helpful to think that way about the past,” says Jean-Pierre. “Things arrive in their own time.”
The Dardennes bring to mind filmmakers like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach in England, and Gianni Amelio in Italy, in their late blooming and their unapologetically left-wing stance. But where in the misanthropic world does their faith in humanity come from? “We are in large measure a product of the education we received as children, from our parents particularly,” says Jean-Pierre. “Life will always hold disappointments. And in the place where we grew up, we saw that at work every day. We saw people confronting great difficulties in their daily lives, and they always fought back and found solutions.” Oui, voila!
