Belgian Brothers' Working-Class Heroes
	Joan Dupont, International Herald Tribune. 29 October, 2002. Original article here. The Dardenne brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre, live outside the main stellar systems, making movies like modest proposals, showing scenes of strife in the working world. It is a world without romance, gadgets or glamour. Men of few words — even fewer in English — the Belgian brothers find themselves on the fast festival route, from Cannes to Toronto and New York, picking up awards on their way. "When you travel with a film, you put it behind you," says Jean-Pierre. "That's how we separate from it and get on with the next one," says Luc. The incorrigible Dardennes still speak with one voice, completing each other's sentences. Although Jean-Pierre, once an actor, is the elder, it is Luc, the philosophy student, who does the talking. Since their first success, with La Promesse, six years ago, the system has revolved in their favor. Today, audiences seem to have an appetite for what goes on in the real world, and the brothers' hard-hitting documentary approach is — at last — perceived as modern. In 1999, Rosetta, about a working girl who drops out of the system, won the Palme d'or at Cannes. This year, Olivier Gourmet won best actor there for Le Fils (The Son). But the brothers who function as an unusually compatible couple have been making movies since 1981, and it took years before their talent was noticed. "When we showed La Promesse to Cannes, we were at our wits' end," Luc recalls. "We were afraid of the reception because our last movie had been a disaster and if La Promesse hadn't worked, we would have stopped making movies." "Your work has to find an echo," echoes Jean-Pierre. "It's not about box office, it's about recognition. At one point, a film works, like a chemical mix, in this case, it was the theme: the father-son relationship, clandestine immigration, an African woman." In La Promesse, Gourmet played a terrifying figure who initiates his son into a lawless world. In Le Fils, he plays a carpenter who trains young people. He has lost his own son and has to deal with a wild mute boy, just out of prison, his son's murderer. He swerves between wanting to hurt the boy and seeking to help him; the camera keeps pace with his violence and the agony of his indecision. "We tried to find a rhythm for the film, to build tension, that's why we have no music," Luc says. "We use those constant camera movements to track Olivier as he hovers on the edge of murder." The plot is built like an enigma, the camera hugs the man closing in on the boy, cornering him with hard questions. And the story, as in their other films, has a moral core: Just as Rosetta almost let a friend drown, Olivier yanks himself away from the brink of murderous impulses. After Rosetta, in which Gourmet had a small part, the brothers promised him that one day, they would cast him in a big part. "We didn't have any idea what the theme would be; we just love to watch him work; he's a puzzle. And he carries the movie on his back." A bulky man who whittled himself down to play the part. Gourmet wears a watchful expression behind large glasses; he can look ominous. His body says it all. "We tell the story from the father's point of view and we called it Le Fils, but it's really the father's story: He's the one who doesn't kill because he can't both be a father and a man who transmits murder." Gourmet, whose father was a farmer and whose mother ran a small hotel, is himself a man of many trades, a carpenter, a fixer. He went to the Liege Conservatory where he met Jean-Pierre years later. "Olivier looked like an ordinary man, and that's what attracted us to him; he doesn't look like an actor." Weekends, Gourmet still goes to the family hotel to help out in the kitchen, and when Le Fils was shown locally in the city hall, he raised a toast saying, "It's a shame of course, for Jack Nicholson, that he didn't win the award, but, hey, for our town, it's terrific." The idea of Le Fils was inspired by the case of two Liverpool adolescents who kidnapped a small boy and killed him. "What does it mean to be a child who kills a child? What does it say about parents and society?" Luc asks. "Olivier is supposed to be teaching the boy carpentry and things a father would teach a son, so he's put himself in a hard place." Morgane Marinne who plays the boy had worked at various apprentice jobs. "You feel his life hasn't been very clear, and we liked something that made him strong and suspicious, with tiger eyes. He resisted us." With each film, the Dardennes' camera seems to move in closer, the pacing is more intense, the movements more frantic. "Our need to film that way came out of the material, but it mustn't become a formal device." Jean-Pierre agrees, "We have to be careful not to shut ourselves up in a system." Raised in Seraing, a coal-mining suburb of Liege, the brothers grew up without movies. "We don't have any kind of cinema memory; we got there late in life. In our village, every year there was a fete and at the end, they gave us a pair of shoes and a ski jacket and showed us a movie. That was our first time." Their strict father was against entertainment of any kind; their mother, an operetta singer, gave them the desire for a less rigorous life. They were attracted to the serious social documentary process of the '70s. They met up with Armand Gatti, the French theater director who had made a stirring film on concentration camps. "We became Gatti's assistants, which meant all sorts of things, like keeping him company while he ate," Jean-Pierre recalled. "He told us to look into video, so we started by recording his work and the people he interviewed." "We made films in a rustic fashion, basic stuff, portraits, and showed them to the workers," Luc resumes. "Then we got an editing table and tried something different: a history of the workers' movement in our region. We discovered people who had been in the Resistance, or they had been independent thinkers, excluded from their union." They interviewed a local hero, a man who had edited a newspaper during a strike. Ten years later, they met him again, down and out, begging at the train station. "He had been a hero during the strike, and then failed at everything he did, but he was an extraordinary witness of our times. This is what nourishes us, the stories of these people." Only a few hours from Paris, Brussels and Liege, where the brothers live, seem far away. They have a hard time finding a kinship with French filmmakers. They admire Laurent Cantet, director of Ressources humaines (Human Resources) and L'emploi du temps (Time Out). "We wanted to co-produce him because we like his kind of cinema." The French director Bruno Dumont, of La Vie de Jesus (Life of Jesus) and Humanite (Humanity), seems to have something in common with the brothers' vision: They share a cold stark northern countryside, a landscape that is yet not void of Christian reflection and the notion of redemption. "There are things in common with our movies," Luc concedes. "Little dialogue, the way things emerge organically, and there's an obsessional way of unveiling the story. We're somewhat on the same turf, and have more in common with each other than with French cinema today, or, let's say, Paris cinema. But we don't film bodies the same way and Dumont shows more sky than we do." Their films of low horizons and worker heroes bear more resemblance, they think, to the world of Maurice Pialat. "He works with raw matter and we like his violence." They go for the simplicity of John Ford and the artistry of Kenzo Mizoguchi, his "elliptical way of showing things." "In Le Fils, we wanted to film the gestures of a man transmitting his craft, without making a documentary on carpentry," Luc says. "There's tension and a sense of expectancy, you wonder what is coming next." The brothers find that the borders between documentary and feature film have become blurred and now, instead of being forever out of fashion, they are finally on their own terrain. "Today there's a cinema that listens to what is going on in the world," Luc says, "and a generation that asks questions."