1 minute read
a Handshake
The Son (Le
fils)
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Belgium/France 2002
Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
103 min. DCP
In French with English subtitles
New Restoration
A virtuosic work of formal austerity and secular parable, the Dardennes’ blistering drama, made between Palme d’Or winners Rosetta and L’Enfant, is “probably the brothers’ masterpiece” (J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader). Olivier Gourmet, awarded Best Actor at Cannes for his devastatingly somatic performance, is namesake Olivier, a carpentry teacher at a vocational school for troubled youth, whose spare, solitary existence hints at past injury. When teenage Francis (Morgan Marinne) is paroled to the workshop, Olivier’s strange fascination with the boy soon lays bare a tragedy binding their former lives together. As ever in the brothers’ laconic cinema, psychology is eschewed and motivations are unclear, even to the characters themselves. The visceral 16mm camerawork is the product of a corps-caméra technique designed to imbue the image with embodied subjectivity. Philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas’s face-to-face ethics guide the film’s moral underpinnings.
“As assured and flawless a telling of sadness and joy as I have ever seen … The Son is a great film.”
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Rosetta
Belgium/France 1999
Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
93 min. DCP
In French with English subtitles
New Restoration
“The most visceral filmgoing experience of the past year … It makes just about every other form of movie ‘realism’ look like trivial escapism.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s tour-de-force, a watershed work in social realist cinema, was the upset winner of top prize at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. (It would be the first of two Palme d’Ors for the Belgian masters.) Refining the already bare, vérité aesthetic of breakout feature La promesse, the brothers’ incendiary drama is an unflinching portrait of Rosetta (powerhouse Émilie Dequenne, crowned Best Actress at Cannes), a near-destitute young woman fighting tooth-and-nail to eke out an existence for herself and her alcoholic mother. The stark, soulful story achieves eminence thanks to veristic performances by Dequenne, Olivier Gourmet, and Fabrizio Rongione (in his first Dardenne collaboration), and a camera practically tethered to the nape of the heroine’s neck. In its crystalline portrayal of suffering and grace, the work bears resemblance to Robert Bresson’s transcendent Mouchette
