A Promessa

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.