Rosetta

In hindsight, the rare double Cannes winner (Best Picture and Best Actress) looks to serve as the basis for the predominant Social Realist movement of European cinema in the 2000s. Though the Dardennes' 'La Promesse' predates this, arguably 'Rosetta'’s vigorous documentary techniques and intense focus on its working class protagonist jumpstarted this movement. It’s still a magnificent picture - bold, unconventional but brilliant storytelling at its core rendered even more exquisite by the Criterion Blu-ray treatment.

Rosetta (1999) dir. Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne
Starring: Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Anne Yernaux, Olivier Gourmet

By Alan Bacchus

Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne) is a sad case, living in a trailer park, subject to the whims of her irresponsible mother who prostitutes her body to the superintendant to pay for their heating bills. She has everything working against her. But shining through this cloud of poverty and depression is a fierce determination to succeed. The Dardennes, armed with their handheld camera, follow the impressive Émilie Dequenne around the city with the utmost of urgency, a thrilling journey of body and soul.

Émilie sets her sights on a job at a waffles stand – a meager low-paying job but a legitimate occupation which instills pride in her work. That said, her means of achieving this are dubious. Not unlike how her mother sells herself to their landlord, Rosetta ingratiates herself with her friend, Riquet, who works the stand to convince his boss (Dardennes stalwart Olivier Gourmet) to hire her. The job doesn’t last long when she’s let go in favour of the boss’s son. The result is a magnificent scene for Dequenne, a violent and desperate anger-fueled fit of rage.

Rosetta’s next step is even more dubious, as she rats on her boyfriend for skimming the till and stealing from the boss. It’s a devastating turn of events; a heartless betrayal by Rosetta, the anguish of wish is expressed on the quiet intensity of Dequenne’s remarkable face.

When Rosetta’s mother lapses into alcoholism, thus threatening her life, Rosetta’s priorities are in conflict, forcing her to make some even more powerful life decisions. All the while the Dardennes keep their camera tethered to Dequenne’s shoulder for maximum emotional impact.

Rosetta is the second of the Dardennes' continuing series of Social Realism pictures which target the poverty-stricken urban peoples. After La Promesse and Rosetta, Le Fils and L’Enfant impressively furthered their examination of the impoverished. The thrill of the Dardennes' modus operandi is their ability to laser in on their characters so precisely that we become invested and involved in even the most insignificant of activities in their lives, including Rosetta’s fixation on her makeshift fish-trap, which she’s placed in the river and checks every day. It’s slightly pathetic, but it's an indication of her active desire to do anything, however futile, to be self-determining and self-reliant.

The greatness of the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is the profound nature of scenes like this.

****

Rosetta is available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

CANNES 2011 - The Kid with a Bike

The Kid with a Bike "Le Gamin au Vélo" (2011) dir. The Dardenne Brothers
Starring Cécile de France, Jérémie Renier, and Thomas Doret

***

By Blair Stewart

Belgium's Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Rosetta, The Son and The Child) return to Cannes with their winning cinéma vérité formula. Approaching films with a focus on lower-class European sociology, the Dardennes' storytelling engages you with films of emotional complexity that are told with what initially appears to be docu-drama simplicity.

The Kid with a Bike follows the lousy situation of 11-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret), dumped by his father (Jérémie Renier, a grown-up follow-up to his role in The Child) into foster care. Cyril is a ball of thwarted energy, furiously pecking away at his perceived imprisonment by jumping fences, badgering his councillors and doing anything to burrow back to his absentee pa. He breaks out of the home and runs smack into hairdresser Samantha (Cécile de France), who in turn establishes an often fraught relationship with Cyril as she becomes his surrogate mother. The baggage and vulnerability of Cyril is a weighty task for Samantha, with the child's greatest danger coming from a mentorship with an adolescent thug cut from the same cloth as the boy. In the thug, the Dardennes effortlessly sidestep trite judgement of Cyril's bad company with a simple moment involving the thug caring for his invalid grandmother. A moment like that sticks with me, as a dimension is added to a stock character who has his own motivation for why he would commit crimes. The story has a circular purpose to it, with Cyril's behaviour dictated by his father's choices in another pleasant surprise where I'd almost taken the Belgian filmmaking duo for granted with their script.

The Kid with a Bike doesn't break new ground for Jean-Pierre and Luc, but of their major releases over the past two decades, this is their most overtly sympathetic film – it hurts to watch Cyril. Cécile de France is lovely in her working-class role, as she communicates the interior scheming of a good woman nursing a damaged kid. Thomas Doret is a wonderful child actor, his buzzing restlessness reminiscent of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows. I thought of Truffaut's film often during the long moments of Cyril riding his bike, urgently trying to gain a step in a hopeless situation.

What's kept me from rating The Kid higher is that with each new film, the Dardenne pair tread closer to old grounds and could certainly expand well beyond their safety net. The film's soundtrack is also periodically breached with an overwrought score yearning for catharsis rather loudly.

While The Kid with a Bike doesn't have the heady morality questions of The Son and its payoff, the Dardennes' latest is a fine film that will reward their audience.

Loft

Loft (2009) dir. Erik Van Looy
Starring: Koen De Bouw, Matthias Schoenaerts, Filip Peeters, Koen De Graeve, Veerle Baetens

***1/2

By Alan Bacchus

Loft arrives on DVD in Canada with little previous traction in North America. It received neither a theatrical release nor any major film festival screenings, and so it'll require some heavy lifting to get this into public consciousness. Well, let this be my small part.

This 2009 Belgian thriller unravels a very steamy potboiler about five buddies who co-own an ultra-cool loft specifically for the purpose of their extramarital trysts. When one day they walk in and find a nude dead girl on the bed suddenly they all suspect each other of murder. From this salacious set-up we're in the world of Joe Eszterhas, a trashy, '90s-era, pseudo-sexual throwback, or something in the genre of airport paperback writers like Dean Koontz. But after a first act hump we quickly find ourselves ensnared in a surprisingly well thought out and near-airtight, white-knuckle whodunit.

After the discovery, the men have to figure out A) what to do with the body and B) who could have perpetrated such a crime, and through flashbacks, we learn about the events that led up to this grisly murder. Each individual is drawn with simplistic characterizations, such as the coke-snorting playboy, the awkward nice guy and the manipulative, rich architect. But after the tedious exposition the film catches fire in the second act when writer Bart De Pauw starts to reveal each character's motivations and drops a good helping of red herrings involving the possible vengeance of their wives and the corporate intrigue of their business dealings.

Director Erik Van Looy embraces the steaminess of the genre and assumes his right to use all camera tricks and visual slickness to embellish the melodrama and produce a compelling genre thriller.

I'm also reminded of Guillaume Canet's 'Tell No One', a similar foreign language genre thriller that couldn't sustain its brilliant cinematic teasing in its third act. With this in mind, I was prepared for the film to fail at the end, and so as each loop hole got tied up, red herrings discarded and just the right number of subplots twisted, Loft actually worked all the up to the end. While Loft is no masterpiece, it's worthy of standing out in the mountain of other new releases on the shelf.

Lorna's Silence

Lorna’s Silence (2009) dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Starring: Arta Dobroshi, Jeremy Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Alban Ukaj, Olivier Gourmet

**

It could be argued that it was Belgian sibling duo the Dardennes brothers that popularized this new prevailing trend towards social realism in international cinema. That is, socially conscious, character-based stories told with an attention to detail for the mundane movements of its characters.

Two Palme D'Ors later and the brothers are back in the realm of social realism with some minor tinkering to the formula, which, unfortunately, results in their least successful offering.

Admittedly I had to read the press release synopsis to clarify some plot points and help it make sense. Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is an Albanian gal living in Belgium who seems to have been set up to live with Claudy (L'Enfant's Jeremie Renier), a junkie trying to go cold turkey from heroin addiction. Things are not what they seem though, as Lorna is actually married to Sokol, who still lives in Albania, but is waiting for Lorna to get her citizenship papers to bring him into the country. Underground schemer Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione) seems to be Lorna's agent, brokering this deal. When a Russian mobster comes into the picture looking to gain citizenship, Lorna is sold for cold hard cash to the Russian for marriage. Meanwhile, as Fabio is pulling Lorna's strings, she gradually develops a conscience and an awareness of the immorality of her actions and looks for a way out.

The Dardennes have trouble balancing a back-story, which requires more exposition than they've ever had to give, with the fact that exposition runs counter to their "in the moment" dogmatic style. The scale leans more towards confusion than genre integrity, as most of the above synopsis and explanations of who's who are left for us to deduce from the implied actions of the characters. We've never told who Lorna is or why she's with Claudy or why she's with a junkie or why she falls for him or why Fabio wants Lorna to marry the Russian. I wouldn't even have known Lorna was Albanian if not for the synopsis.

I'm sure these explanations are in the film somewhere, and maybe I'm the nave for missing them, but the plot feels like a crutch for the filmmakers, who really just want us to laser in on Ms. Dobroshi and Lorna, as they've done before with their other great performances. And indeed, Dobroshi has a wonderful face and nuanced mannerisms, which bring across the internal moral conflict she struggles with.

Sometimes we need more than a facial expression or a nuanced mannerism to keep us going; we desperately want to know what's in Lorna's head and even if we guess it, there's value in the spoken word. And somewhere an important message about the commoditization of Eastern European women and the depths to which many will sink to escape to a life they think they need to have is unfortunately lost.

After a number of these Dardenne street dramas expectations are high, either to better or equal the ones before it, or show us something we haven't seen. 'Lorna's Silence' accomplishes neither and is thus a disappointment.

This review first appeared on Exclaim.ca

L'ENFANT

L’Enfant (2006) dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Starring: Jeremie Renier, Deborah Francois

****

The Dardennes Bros are two Belgian filmmakers known for their neo-realist/documentary approach to filmmaking. Though similar in style to the Danish Dogme 95 films (ie. the Celebration), the Dardennes’ films differ greatly in the types of stories they tell. Whereas the Dogme films tended to portray middle and upper class society, the Dardennes deal strictly with the underclass street youth.


L’Enfant is set in the mean streets of an unnamed Belgian working class city (the Detroit of Belgium). Bruno is a young petty thief and small time hood. Sonia is his pregnant girlfriend – they’re very much in love, though more of a youthful puppylove. With only a few shots the Dardennes establish the environment and the characters perfectly – we know this story, it’s Dickensian and timeless – characters with nothing in their pockets, nothing to lose and no other thoughts than how to get through the day.

When Sonia goes comes home with a baby, Bruno registers little reaction. She may have well come home with a loaf of bread, which would be more exciting to him because he could eat it. The baby is more a burden to Bruno – not only the added cost of feeding and clothing it, but the loss of attention from Sonia.

Bruno decides to sell the baby to the black market. Using underground connections he finds a buyer and is taken to an abandoned building to exchange the child. Bruno never actually meets his buyers. He places the child in an empty room, then leaves. When he returns the baby is replaced with money. Bruno’s carefree attitude about the child is terrifying, and the actual exchange of the ‘goods’ is like an adrenaline shot of street-realism.

Bruno comes home with the money, and expects Sonia to be happy for the sale. She instantly faints. His naiveté is hard to believe, but that’s what makes the character so interesting. Bruno is too innocent to hate, he’s not malevolent, he just doesn’t know any better. And Jeremie Renier’s performance make it utterly believable. The remainder of the film tracks Bruno’s search to retrieve the child.

But Bruno’s journey doesn’t end with getting back his child. He retrieves it because he has to. He does it for Sonia, not for himself. Bruno is harder to crack – the street has made him soulless, unable live beyond his primordial childlike instincts. It’s not until the final moments of the film do we realize what Bruno is looking for – it’s redemption of his soul, something which he didn’t lose, but in fact never had. Something the street has deprived him of.

The Dardennes style is unmistakable. Their camera is always solely fixed on the characters, in this case, Bruno. It follows behind him, over the shoulder almost as his point of view. It stops when Bruno stops and it looks where Bruno looks. And after 10 mins we become invisible participants in Bruno’s adventure.

L’Enfant deservedly won the Dardennes Bros a rarely achieved second Palme D’Or at Cannes. It’s the fourth in a series of similarly themed films (“La Promesse”, “Rosetta”, and “Le Fils”). All films deserve to be discovered. Don’t rent them all at once. All are downbeat and somewhat depressing, but truly rewarding on all emotional levels. Enjoy.