Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne | La Promesse / 1996

broken promises

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne (screenwriters and directors) La Promesse / 1996

 

The 1996 film by the brothers Dardenne, La Promesse, shares much in common with L’Enfant. In this moving work the same actor, Jérémie Renier—nine years before the second film, when he was still a young boy—plays another petty thief, Igor, this time working for his beloved father, Roger. Although he is apprenticing to become an auto mechanic, his first act of the film is to steal the billfold of an elderly lady whose car he is servicing, and we quickly see that—given his father’s demands—he will never even rise to the position of mechanic. After repeatedly leaving his job early in order to help his father, he is fired.

     Roger is in the business of exploiting lives, helping illegal aliens enter the country in turn for near-complete servitude to him as he provides them with a place to live and an indentured job constructing his “dream” home, described in the English translation as “the white house,” clearly representing for the father the Belgian equivalent of the “American dream.”

     Roger, universally hated by his “servants,” uses his own son to collect rent, to service their few needs, and to create the necessary documents they’ll need upon their eventual release from his debt. In a sense, Roger is what one might call a small-time facilitator: he represents the necessary step for these illegal aliens to gradually slip into the fabric of Belgian society, and in that sense he may be a sleazy exploiter of these hopeful men and women, but he is a necessary conduit to their new lives.

     It is this grey zone of behavior that allows the viewer to both hate and sympathize with Igor’s father. Moreover, the Dardennes represent him as a family man; although a younger woman has quite obviously replaced Igor’s mother, Roger, despite his obvious abuse of his son, remains, on his own terms, also a loving father, rewarding Igor with tattoos, a ring that matches his own, and spending-money. The ring is particularly meaningful in this quiet film in which there is little dialogue, for it symbolizes a committed relationship between father and son, a bond that is best expressed cinematically in their off-key but perfectly synchronized rendition of a popular song in the local bar.

     The audience, however, realizes quite early in this film that just below the surface of this easy exploitation of foreigners and son is a potential for violence that may destroy anyone in its way. In one of the earliest scenes of the movie, we are introduced to Assita (Assita Ouedraogo), a Burkina Fasso woman who, with her child, has arrived to join her husband Hamidou. Igor is mesmerized by both the grace and beauty of Assita. Watching her as she bathes herself and child, it is clear that for him she and her child represent a resplendent image of love outside of the “male-bondage”—for it is a bondage, not just a “bonding”—between himself and his father. When inspectors raid the “white house” in search of illegal workers, Igor warns the workers, as they scramble into oblivion. But in his attempt to escape, Hamidou falls from the scaffolding. Igor runs to aid him, but it is clear that the man is dying, and Hamidou demands that the boy promise to “take care” of his wife and child. Igor has just enough time to hide the man before the inspectors arrive, and when they leave, he explains what has happened to his father, demanding they take Hamidou to the hospital.

     Roger recognizes that the demand is impossible; the doctors will surely report them to the authorities. Hamidou dies where he has been hidden in trash, and his body is buried by Roger and his son in cement. As together they wash Hamidou’s blood from their bodies, we perceive it—through the directors’ lens—as a ritualistic act which further binds the two while also designating the end of Igor’s childhood, reiterated soon after when he passes on the key to his beloved go-cart to a young friend. A day later, Roger beats his son for helping Hamidou’s widow, and Igor is forbidden to visit her again

    Unable to get Assita to leave on her own, Roger—afraid that her presence will bring attention to his entire operation—arranges for a delivery of a telegram, supposedly from her missing husband, to meet him in Germany. When Roger offers to drive her to the rendezvous, it becomes apparent to Igor that he is planning to sell her into prostitution.

     As they prepare to leave, Igor suddenly intervenes, escaping with the car and its passengers, Assita and child. Selling the ring his father has given him, he buys her a ticket to Italy, where Hamidou’s brother lives. While he “ditches” the car, we are witness to the kind of life she can look forward to if she stays in Belgium—or, perhaps, can expect in Italy as well. Two local punks piss upon on her and her child as she waits near a bridge, soon after proceeding to drive their motorcycles over the bag in which she carries her worldly possessions.

     Igor puts her up temporarily in his previous employer’s vacant apartment, but she is soon on the street again, seeking someone to take her to the hospital: her baby has a fever! No one will stop, and Igor’s attempt to ameliorate the situation is rejected. Assita refuses any further participation in her own victimization.

     The child is cared for, and a hospital nurse provides both safer living-quarters and her own legal documents to permit Assita to travel. A tribal shaman is called in to determine the cause of the baby’s continuing fever, a ceremony the young Igor watches with painful dismay as the shaman prophesizes that something secret is being kept within, that the child may die if Assita does not find her husband who has not gone away but remains nearby.

     Does she really believe in the ceremony, probes Igor? Yes, she insists.

     As they climb the stairs to where she will leave for Italy, Igor finally releases himself from all the shackles of his past (chains which now symbolically and quite literally embrace his father), admitting to Assita what really happened to Hamidou. She turns back, walking into a dubious future with all the pain and necessity of one having to face the past.

 

Los Angeles, May 22, 2006

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 3 (May-June 2006) and Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).