Themes: Redemption, Teachers and Students, Death of a Child
Main Cast: Olivier Gourmet, Morgan Marinne, Isabella Soupart, Remy Renaud, Nassim Hassaini
Release Year: 2002
Country: BE/FR
Run Time: 103 minutes
Plot
This downbeat drama by acclaimed Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne bears a thematic and formal resemblance to their previous works, La Promesse and the Palme D'Or winner Rosetta. Dardenne brothers' regular Olivier Gourmet is in every frame as the stern Olivier, a carpenter who teaches the craft to teenagers seeking a vocation. Olivier's drab routine is interrupted by the enrollment of a new student, Francis (Morgan Marinne), who becomes the object of the carpenter's inexplicable obsession. Speaking with his ex-wife, Magali (Isabella Soupart), about his new charge, Olivier reveals the reason for his fixation: Francis was the young street tough who murdered their child years ago. Now out of juvenile prison, Francis seeks to start anew, and eventually even asks the flummoxed Olivier to become his guardian. Olivier withholds his knowledge from the oblivious Francis, even as a tentative relationship between the two develops. The tense scenario leads to a climactic confrontation at a lumberyard, as the past finally catches up with teacher and student. This rigorous and deliberately paced film played in competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, where Gourmet was awarded the best actor prize. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide
Review
Admirers of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne will find much to like in The Son, the Belgian brothers' third feature film. Like their previous works, the highly acclaimed La Promesse and Rosetta, The Son is a stylistically rigorous, emotionally wrenching drama of moral reckoning. The first half-hour may cause a lot of head-scratching because of the Dardennes' deliberately elliptical storytelling, but once the central dilemma snaps into focus, the movie becomes unusually gripping. Dardenne regular Olivier Gourmet gives a standout performance as Olivier, a carpentry teacher who encounters his child's killer many years later. Now a teenager fresh out of juvenile detention, the student (Morgan Marinne) does not know who Olivier is -- and Olivier is not eager to fill him in either. What Olivier chooses to do with his new charge becomes the stuff of this movie's suspense. True to form, the Dardennes disregard the demands of plot and generic convention, letting their character-driven drama unfold organically. Although their vérité-style camerawork might cause seasickness with some viewers, it also abets the movie's hypnotic naturalism. The brothers display respect for their unglamorous subjects, capturing them in moments of seeming unimportance. Focusing our gaze on the mundane, the Dardennes attune us to the momentousness of the trivial. Infused with religious feeling, The Son ends with a gesture of unannounced decency that perfectly sums up the Dardennes' cinema of dignity. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide
Cast
Olivier Gourmet - Olivier
Morgan Marinne - Francis
Isabella Soupart - Magali
Remy Renaud - Philippo
Nassim Hassaini - Omar
Credit
Monique Parelle - Costume Designer, Bernard Garant - First Assistant Director, Jean-Pierre Dardenne - Director, Luc Dardenne - Director, Marie-Hélène Dozo - Editor, Olivier Bronckart - Line Producer, Igor Gabriel - Production Designer, Alain Marcoen - Cinematographer, Denis Freyd - Producer, Jean-Pierre Dardenne - Producer, Luc Dardenne - Producer, Thomas Gauder - Sound/Sound Designer, Jean-Pierre Dardenne - Screenwriter, Luc Dardenne - Screenwriter
The practice of work is central to Le fils (The Son), a movie about revenge and redemption. The film, like all of the Dardennes’, seems straightforward enough: Olivier, a carpenter (played by Olivier Gourmet, who, like Duquenne, earned an acting prize at Cannes), takes on a young man named Francis as an apprentice. Francis is newly released from juvenile detention, and Olivier discovers immediately that Francis played a part in the death of his son some years earlier. Francis is unaware of the connection he shares with Olivier, and the Dardennes’ use this asymmetrical relationship to investigate the ideas of forgiveness and vindication. “For all its quasi-documentary materialism, The Son is ultimately a Christian allegory of one man's inchoate desire to return good for evil.” In this way Le fils is something of a departure from the Dardennes’ earlier work: it’s not the sort of movie that gets labor legislation named after it. Olivier’s carpentry is observed with unstinting and careful detail; it is not a means for sustenance but a means for existence. “It is hardly surprising that the Dardennes put together their naturalist fable with such a fanatical, self-effacing sense of craft. They are obsessed with work in the way that some of their European counterparts are obsessed with sex: the textures and rhythms of manual labor are, for them, at once irreducibly physical and saturated with an almost spiritual significance.”
Luc Dardenne wrote in his book Au dos de nos images a comment about The Son. Magali, the ex-wife of Olivier is very astonished Olivier took Francis, the murderer of their son, in his workshop . She says to Oivier in The Son: "Nobody would do that . He answers: I do know it. And she replies: "Then, why do you do it?. He answers: I don't know. And Luc Dardenne wrote : We also, we don't kow it.[2]
^ French Il y a quelque chose d'impossible dans ce que fait Olivier. Magali a sans doute raison de lui dire: 'Pourquoi tu le fais alors?', et il a sans doute raison de lui répondre: 'Je ne sais pas.' Nous non plus, on ne sait pas. in Au dos de nos images, Seuil, Paris, 2005 (first published) and 2008 (pocket book), p.127. ISBN 978-2-7578-0891-7
