LE FILS
THE SON |
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Director:
Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
Cast: Olivier: Olivier Gourmet
Francis: Morgan Marinne
Magali: Isabella Soupart
Awards: Best Actor (Gourmet),
Cannes Film Festival (2002).
Running time: 103 minutes
Production: France/Belgium, 2002
Rating: Not rated
Gauge: 16 & 35mm (color); enquire re DVD
Language: French
Distributor: New Yorker Films
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"The
Dardenne brothers command our attention by a brilliant use of cinema.
There are long takes and few establishing shots. For most of the time
the unsmiling, bespectacled Olivier is viewed in close-up--full face,
profile or quite often just the back of his head... There is no music
to direct our emotions, no commentary or explanatory exposition, and
we’re drawn into an astonishing intimacy with this laconic, injured
man." Philip French, The Observer. |
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A carpentry
teacher at a vocational school in Liège, Olivier lives in
silent anguish after the death of his son. One day 16-year-old Francis,
released from juvenile detention, arrives at the school. The boy’s
unexpected appearance unnerves Olivier, who recognizes Francis as
the murderer of his son. Appalled, he refuses to accept him into
his class, then he abruptly changes his mind. Transfixed by the
boy, Olivier finds himself spying on him at school and stalking
him through the streets. Olivier’s ex-wife, distressed as much
by Francis’s reappearance as by Olivier’s fascination
with him, demands to know what Olivier wants from the boy. Olivier
claims not to know but, bound to Francis by the boy’s crime,
he continues to pursue him in an attempt to force some kind of resolution
to his own suffering: redemption perhaps, or damnation. With a plot
as simple as a parable, the story’s moral density seems born
of the sheer physicality of the hand-held camera work. As in the
films of Bresson, the opaqueness of people, filmed like objects
in close-up--the nape of Olivier’s neck, his squinting eyes
distorted by thick glasses--forces us to exercise our moral imagination,
to put ourselves in the place of another, just as Olivier himself
must do to overcome his protracted anger and grief.
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| PHOTO New
Yorker Films |
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