Adolescence is defined precisely by its lack of definition. And it is there, in that unstable terrain between silence and rebellion, where the Dardenne brothers place their last film. Young Ahmed is starring a boy with the poise, clarity and insolence of, why not, Holden Caulfield. «If they are really interested, the first thing they will probably want to know is where I was born, and how my lousy childhood was and what my parents did before they had me, and all that crap ..., but I don't feel like getting into that, that's the truth". The recurring appointment with which Salinger presents his hero in The Guardian in the Rye might well be worth exactly the same for the young protagonist of the work of the Belgians who one day decided to distrust everything and everyone. And so on to the most absolute destruction. Of everyone and everything. Even of himself.
They count the Dardenne (Luc and Jean-Pierre) and they do it in a studied game of syncopated voices in which it ends up being indistinguishable from each other that their first objective was precisely to investigate that virgin space in which there are not yet guilty or innocent neither victims nor executioners. «At age 13, which is the protagonist's age, it is difficult even to discern whether it is a child, a young man or just a teenager. What part of his actions are the responsibility of his family, his circle of friends or society itself, and which ones should he attribute to himself? We are not referring to a criminal responsibility, but to something more difficult to discern and that is at the bottom of what we are or what we will end up being, ”they say.
To situate ourselves, the last film of the directors with the privilege of two golden palms in Cannes dares with one of the greatest, or at least more bleeding, themes of our time: the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in European secularized societies as an image clear of its most intimate failure. The peculiarity, it has already been said, is that the look to be scrutinized is that of a teenager caught between his desire for Koranic purity and the accidents of age. And here the temptations of sin, always carnal, mingle with the momentum of hormones in an essentially confusing space. Again, as in all Dardenne cinema and as Cauldfield himself would subscribe, the past, the motivations or simply the context hardly play a role. It is not so much about tracking down the social roots of a problem with the appearance of the worst of cancers as it unravels the saddest mechanisms of confusion. And, even more relevant, inquire into the way, if possible, to free yourself.
"Of course," says Luc, "we were challenged by what has been going on in the heart of Europe all these years. In Paris, in Madrid ... and especially in Brussels [on March 22, 2016, an attack by the self-proclaimed Islamic State in the subway of the Belgian capital killed 35 people, including the three terrorists]. The film is born from the need to offer our own point of view ». «But», and now it is Jean-Pierre who takes over and the word, «we immediately knew that the scope of the film did not have to be to investigate how fans become fans. It is not a film about the social conditions that have taken us here and what precedes radicalization. Many movies have already been made about it. We started from the proven fact that most of the terrorists are European, since they were born here, and we leave aside the reasons that have led them to the situation in which they are and we are. What we wanted was to confront the dark rigidity of fanaticism with the necessarily luminous evidence of a child who discovers life. Without further explanation. Yes, it is an optimistic movie ». And there is explicit the argumentation and even book of style of the young Ahmed.
As is law in the Dardenne cinema, the camera chases the characters as pending of each gesture barely visible as alien to any dramatic endeavor. The idea is to leave, in effect, that it is history itself that is revealed, that arises. Without dramaturgies, without imposing movements, what counts is the story, but naked, free of all the devices that usually manipulate and even dirty the look. And so on to touch something as pure, strange and contradictory as a story without a story, a story without fiction, a perfectly real fable. Not in vain, in the stubborn ideology of the directors of Rosetta, The boy or the boy of the bicycle, reality is only visible through the fabric of the story just to the same extent that the story only makes sense in the hardness of the real.
And in this way, the film advances obsessively and precisely within the head of the teenager who refuses to give more explanation than his insolence (it was that garbage of "the lousy childhood"). Each of your doubts matter. The contradictory moment of light in which the dirty touch of a calf's skin shakes every certainty matters. The moment of a caress matters for what is brutal. And all this, by the hand of a transparent and perfectly recognizable staging that leads the viewer through the labyrinths of correctional institutions as if it is a thriller in the same way that is lost in every moment of faith and uncertainty of the protagonist. And so on until reaching an end by rugged force. "We test many conclusions," they confess to the duo, "and we opt for the least defeatist." That said, there are, in the opinion of the directors, reasons to believe, but in another way.
The Dardennes say that a fan is never aware of doing anything wrong. "Dramatically, a fan is closer to the unconscious than to the villain," they say. And they add: «But that makes him more interesting. The fan is convinced that everything he does is for good. Believe in the goodness of your actions. His mission is to purify everything he considers impure. The question, therefore, that we asked ourselves is how to get out of that vicious circle, how to convince someone who is convinced otherwise of your mistake. And that, they insist, applies to all religions: «Just as there are Muslim fans, there are Christians or Jews. Fanaticism is a religious phenomenon that concerns any religion. It is a serious mistake to match, as does the extreme right, immigration and terrorism. In fact, it is bad faith to do so. It must be clear that most Muslims are against Islamic fanaticism. But this is not what young Ahmed deals with. And at this point, as if it were an agreed code, the brothers demonstrate why they have been working together since the late 80's. To chorus: «Loneliness and unhappiness are, in the end, the engines of any change: either towards the darkness or towards the light ».
If you want, the film is a conclusion and at the same time refutes a good part of the directors' filmography to date. Like some of his most prominent heroes caught in the almost irrational violence of childhood, Ahmed is also driven by obsession. However, now everything opens to, again, perplexity. The forcefulness with which the protagonist moves has both defense against the aggression of the world as self-affirmation. And with doubt, as the movie makes clear, hope.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more- movie theater
- Film reviews
- culture
CineFrozen 2: feminist and 'lesbian' history that relaunched Disney returns
CineA feminist protest forces to cancel a preview in Paris of the new Polanski film
The Paper Sphere Mario Cabré, the unlikely Catalan