The Son

The directors of 'The Son', brothers Jeane-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, are together experienced documentarians. This is made explicitly clear in the film's style, which affords the camera the rare opportunity in modern cinema to see rather than show. The difference is immense. Renoir, Ozu and Rossellini understood the difference, and now the Dardennes can be added to that illustrious list.

The Dardenne brothers are masters of exploding the minutiae of everyday life to beautiful, poetic proportions. Their films are largely concerned with observing people at work (see also Rosetta and La Promesse), obsessively detailing the intricate structures and routines of the mundane, the everyday. Hitchcock famously described film as life with the boring bits removed; a Dardenne film is life with the boring bits dissected, investigated and ultimately celebrated.

The film is about all the sons - the sons that were, the sons that are and the sons that will be - and all should see it.

The rapt watchfulness of this film is almost intolerable.

The minutiae of the woodwork instructor protagonist's drab and solitary daily existence merely repel us at first: his opaque, inexpressive, sulky-looking face (on the rare occasions that we see it, as opposed to the back of his neck) seems to confirm that there is nothing here for us, nothing but the muffled dullness of a dead-end existence, nothing but the droning of power tools in the sullen workshop and the heating-up of tinned soup in the bare little apartment.

Then the film's remorseless attention to the mundane starts to hint at some turmoil of this man's inner life, which is being kept rigorously in check by everyday rituals: the conscientious painful sit-ups, the critical measurement of the trainees' clumsy work. Something unbearable is being borne. Some terrible price is being paid. Olivier is like some powerful caged mammal, ever darting just ahead the camera's reach. We fear for the boys in his domininion -- especially for the new trainee, whom he stalks with a feral intensity.

And now we learn the awful sadness of what ails Olivier, and what has brought everything to a head. Now the camera watches his every move with mixed dread and wonder. Now every little thing he does matters, as we struggle to gauge what he will do next. Now the details of just what nail to use, of the trick to carrying a heavy wooden lintel (so like a cross), become utterly compelling -- not as displacement activities, but as things that can be relied upon, as tangible truths.

And finally, on long drive to a timber yard one late-autumn weekend, we watch a miracle unfold: halting, clumsy, almost wordless, although there is a sort of confession, and a sort of catechism. Wet leaves still stick to the boy's back from a momentary struggle in a wood as the newly-cut planks are stacked, silently, in the trailer. Master and apprentice are joined by the mystery of their craft. A father without a son has found a son without a father.

And now, at last, we understand that the film's watchfulness has been Olivier's own: his need to observe, to assess, to measure up (something for which he has a peculiar knack), in order to decide how the right thing is to be done. For only then is it done decisively, deftly and truly.

That a film of such simplicity, unflinching honesty and moral intensity can be made today is itself little short of miraculous. In both its symbolic language and its belief in the possibility of grace, it is firmly rooted in a particular north-European pietistic (and specifically Catholic) tradition. But never mind about that. This is a genuine and beautifully modest masterpiece of humane realism.

The Son, the latest film from Jean and Luc Dardenne (La Promesse, Rosetta) challenges us to look at our capacity for forgiveness and, in the process, articulates what it means to be human. According to the directors, the film is about "The moral imagination or the capacity to put oneself in the place of another". Olivier (Olivier Gourmet), a lonely carpentry teacher at a vocational rehabilitation school in Belgium, is a stolid, ordinary looking, and inexpressive man. His eyes are hidden behind thick glasses and his back is protected by a support brace. His entire being seems to be "in permanent disequilibrium" but conveys a pent-up energy that seems ready to explode. Olivier has been separated from his wife Magali (Isabella Soupart) since their young son was murdered during a bungled robbery and the half-hearted way they interact indicate the mourning has not been completed. When Francis (Morgan Marinne), a 16-year old boy just released from reform school, appears at the workshop, Olivier, seems strangely obsessed with the youngster, at first rejecting then taking him on at the school.

Not much happens during the first half-hour. The focus is on the minutiae of the workplace, the techniques of woodworking, the source of lumber, precise measurements, how to hold and carry wood and so forth. The claustrophobic camera follows Olivier around the workshop, breathing down his neck, back, and ears, creating a disorienting rhythm of almost unbearable intensity. There is no soundtrack other than the hammers and electric saws. Olivier follows Francis around with his eyes and we suspect there may be something unusual going on. This is confirmed when Olivier secretly steals the keys to Francis' apartment and lies on his bed. Later he meets the boy at a fast food place and impresses him with his ability to gauge distances with his eye. He then invites Francis to join him on the weekend to pick up some wood at a mill about 40km away. There is little dialogue on the trip and the tension is palpable. When the boy asks Olivier to become his guardian, the teacher demands to know the reason why he was locked up for five years. Their arrival at the mill leads to an inevitable confrontation and a startling conclusion of profound beauty.

`Rosetta', the previous movies made by the `brothers' - as Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are referred to in Belgium - was great. What makes `Le Fils' even more enthusiasting is that the authors have now reached a point of perfection where they can tell us a sophisticate story which deals with some of the most devastating feelings we could face; but still, they treat the subject with an amazing simplicity and humanity. I could only compare this movies with some pieces of music by Charlie Haden: essential.

[ S P O I L E R S ]

In the Dardenne brothers' "Le Fils" ("The Son"), Olivier (Olivier Gourmet) teaches carpentry in a trade school for wayward boys that's a transition from juvenile detention to life in society. The camera focuses on Olivier, tightly on his head and shoulders, relentlessly on him. He walks around the workshop and school. First he makes sure a board is run through a chain saw properly, then he denies a new boy entry into his class, then surprisingly he sneaks around, running, breathless, to peek at the boy as he sits in the office. The boy, Francis (Morgan Marinne), wanted carpentry, but is put in metal shop. Later Olivier goes back to the office after a short period of spying on Francis and says he can come into carpentry after all. Thus begins a relationship between Olivier and this boy that seems to have odd overtones.

We see Olivier at home. He has a back problem and does sit-ups to strengthen his abdominal muscles. He is visited by his shyly smiling ex-wife, Magali (Isabella Soupart), who is to remarry, and will have a child. Olivier is alone, immersed in his work, of which he says only "it makes me feel useful." What we learn is that this new boy in the carpentry class killed their son. Magali is shocked to hear of his appearance: Olivier doesn't tell her the truth: that he has taken the boy into his class. Olivier has decided to nurture the boy; to spy on him; to confront him. It's all of those things.

The Dardennes, who were once documentarians and have made the dramas "La Promesse"(1996) and "Rosetta" (the 1999 Palme d'Or at Cannes), are relentless in their dedication to the mundane lives of working people. The intense narrative focus, which abjures any extraneous amusement or aesthetic flourishes, and the closeness of the handheld camera work, make constructing a wooden box or playing a game of arcade soccer or nearly falling off a ladder into momentous events. Every scene is so bluntly clear and in-your-face it almost hurts to watch. But it's a good hurt -- the hurt of passionately committed filmmaking.

There is no music, only the loud sounds of machinery and woodworking as a background for human voices. The Dardennes show some of the same ability to use a dogged devotion to an everyday reality to get at the essence of their characters and to dissect profound moral dilemmas that we also see in Bruno Dumont's Zen poems of dead-end French provincial life, "La Vie de Jésus" (1997) and "L'Humanité" (1999). One might also think of Rossellini or Bresson. But the Dardennes are Belgian. Olivier Gourmet, who stars in all three of the Dardennes' films, has a harsh, wooden manner. He rarely does anything but bark commands. His glasses hide his eyes.

In "The Son," Olivier is the essence of fairness. Imagine losing your son, and taking his young murderer as your protégé. Magali's reaction is hysterical when she discovers this. But Olivier calms her and procedes with the trip to his brother's lumberyard, where Francis will learn a lesson in recognizing types of wood and where the final showdown (though it is really a beginning) will occur. Neither Gourmet, who has acted in many films, nor Marinne, who has not, seems like an actor. Both have a stolid opacity and an independence that make you accept them as real, mysterious human beings.

Carpentry is an ideal métier for Olivier. Wood expands and contracts: the rules aren't absolute. But the work is honest and the job must be done right. Olivier is experienced, firm, and fair, and his eye can judge the exact distance between two points. No wonder Francis is diffident and respectful toward his teacher and quickly asks him, on this trip to the lumberyard, to be his guardian. For all his gruffness, Olivier is a great and good man. (Interesting that as the father in "La Promesse," Gourmet used much the same manner to convey a man who was cruel and dishonest.) Neither man nor boy is at all good looking or charismatic; both are unsmiling and determined in manner. But both of them earn our profound sympathy and respect in this astonishing, rigorous, humanistic film.

A theft that led to killing, intimacy with the murderer of your own son: these are primal, almost Oedipal situations, and "The Son" for all its ordinariness contains the stuff of high tragedy. Olivier's bluntness and strength and the boy's eager innocence allow truths to come out quickly. The early scenes may seem grating. The tight, jittery camera work is almost sick-making. But the later scenes are more and more moving and cathartic. At the end Francis and Olivier stand side by side in the lumberyard, dirty, wet, exhausted, and speechless. Nothing further needs to be said. Few films leave one with a fuller sense of completion and resolution. It's a superb moment. "The Son" teaches a very profound moral lesson: a wrong can be healed by returning it with goodness. For all the seeming roughness of the technique and the lack of flourishes, the effect is masterful. Gourmet received the prize for best actor at Cannes last year for his performance.