The Jean-Pierre Dardenne , Luc Dardenne , who completed his new work Le jeune Ahmed ( Le jeune Ahmed " ) in 2019 with their usual creative rules , is both exciting and exciting. Having tried more than two consecutive attempts to transform unsatisfactory, can they successfully swim against the current and reverse the decline in their creations? It's surprising enough to say that they're halfway through: after all, once the above question is raised and realized, the answer is mostly a negative negation. In Young Ahmed, the Dane brothers return to the cinematic approach they are familiar with and are good at, and that have shaped many of their classic predecessors: capturing the body and action details of non-professional actors to create characters, telling the state of characters when they face (moral, but not limited to moral) dilemmas, and their leaps and liberations from them.
Thirteen-year-old Ahmed, influenced by the radical imam of his community, embarked on the path of radical Islam under the influence of his cousins who died in jihad. He followed the Quran, which had been misinterpreted by the former, and was full of rejection and hostility toward all apostates—such as classmates, sisters, and drinking mothers who did not follow his teachings, and even more so, Inès, a school teacher who supported secularization and had a Jewish boyfriend, and he decided not to recite the old grace and assassinate to defend the purity of the doctrine. Ahmed, who was imprisoned in the Adolescent Re-education Center after unsuccessfully, became more stealthily radical, and all attempts to get him out of his extreme ideas inspired him to kill again. The wandering between killing and not killing has become the biggest suspense of the film, and the mutation of the former to the latter has correspondingly become a footnote for the Dane brothers to watch the current world. It will be misunderstood and more easily interpreted as a manifestation of creative laziness, but in essence it becomes a helpless and appropriate refraction of some temporarily unsolvable problems.
Stills from Young Ahmed.
"Incarnation"
After "La fille inconnue" was released at the Cannes Film Festival three years ago, the Dane brothers returned to the editing room to complete a new version. This is rare for creators who have been able to complete the work in one go, and the main dissatisfaction, as they recall, is that the female lead actress Adèle Haenel's relationship with the characters is not strong enough to be convincing enough. This is indeed a significant shortcoming of the film, and it also marks the unfinished trilogy (actually two and a half) of the trilogy they tried to transform.
The so-called transformation is actually the use of star actors and the center of the camera observation, from the second star Cécile De France in Le gamin au vélo (2011) to The Two Days and One Night (Deux jours, une nuit, 2014) and the star protagonists Marion Cotillard and Adella Harnell in "The Unknown Girl". This naturally has commercial considerations, but it is also a change of subject in desire: they have always taken the "nameless person/body" as the style label, and naturally have the desire to tame the "cattle" in Hitchcock's mouth over the years. However, this proved to be ineffective, because it was essentially contrary to the aesthetics that the Dane brothers had painstakingly found and established since La Promesse (1996): there was no actor's direction, and the film itself was a process of creating actors. They will elaborately design the characters on the paper, and then refine and determine through long rehearsals, so that the details of the body movements are taken into account, and such a role can only be completed by the person who is originally a "blank piece of paper"—because what is needed is not to play, but to incarnate, to show the spirit that the script text cannot present in the flesh. From this point of view, it can be slightly exaggerated to say that any actor who has a self-label and imprint is not qualified to be the core character of the Dane Brothers' films from reality and idealism. Conversely, it must be said that making a Dane brothers film is probably the best "actor" training course, because it is rare to be able to "invent" actors from film, and they have created two extremely good actors from the first three or four films: Olivier Gourmet and Jérémie Renier.
Thus, it can be said that the successful incarnation of actor Idir Ben Addi in the new film as Ahmed guarantees half of the success of the film. We followed the camera in every detail to see all the details of his movements, up and down the stairs, in the correctional center, and of course the prayers and prayers, or the polishing of the assassination weapon (toothbrush), in which the usual film tension was born, and the authenticity of the characters was revealed by it.
"Pureté"
Discussing what the Dane brothers want to say through this attempted juvenile homicide, or what the film eventually became beyond their original ideas (the latter is also often a sign of a "good" movie), may require a temporary withdrawal from all external religious factors. All of Ahmed's sources of pursuit, anger, and murderous intent, or his "motives," actually come from an absolute need for purity; and the reason why he is younger is that he is not as sophisticated as the directors who write "he" on paper is that he does not know that the non-existence of "purity" is often a lamentable and helpless reality that needs to be accepted; he is trapped in this kind of request until he becomes a nightmare, and no way can he get out: the education of the correction center, the care and care of others, The Revelation of Nature and Animals... Even the ultimate means (of script writing) Girl's Love is useless— Ahmed, stimulated by love and confusion, is back on the road to killing.
Absolute purity not only does not exist, but the pursuit of it is extremely dangerous, and this is the way out that the Dane brothers found for the youth: true purity exists only in death, and the ultimate pursuit of this can only lead to death, so that only when facing his own death can he realize that this is an extreme error and danger, and it is at such a mysterious moment that no one will ever know that they allow this "miracle" or inexplicable action to happen: Ahmed asks Inas for forgiveness. There are many viewers who are not impressed with this ending or think that it is too sloppy, but I think it is precisely the most responsible and honest choice of the creators, and it is also the most moving part of the film. Between killing and not killing, see the truth and righteousness. If Ahmed had stabbed Ines again in the end, there might have been just one more Michael Haneke movie in the world.
The Dane brothers, of course, also knew that cinema was an art impur, and they admitted that it was the attacks in Paris and Brussels that had led them to start writing about the project a few years ago, and that the Islamic fanaticism of extremism was of course the subject of cinema – just as all films had to have a theme, just as the Dane brothers' films are often dubbed "social films", but good cinema will always transcend its subject. Like those Beautiful Dane films: they revolutionized the so-called social films and internally changed their code as "genres", they discuss morality even with a sense of morality, but they do not export morality or even necessarily have (moral) judgments, elevating moral sense to a kind of human pity (human nature is divine). Specific to the treatment of Young Ahmed, there is no explanatory description of the socio-economic conditions of his family as the bottom, avoiding a preconceived sense that he is a "victim" of some reality; especially since the beginning of the film we confront an already extremeized Ahmed rather than a "waste" chapter to describe this process of extremism, all in order to avoid the (moral) trap described above and some kind of positive and good cliché. And that kind of film ending is also an honest answer to the social problems they face as artists, although this answer is different from any previous work - and it is precisely because of this that the film has a more gray and moving. They seem to be saying: We don't know where the way out is.
The uninspired re-enactment of self-variation is the problem and dilemma that most established directors face, and this comes from an ornamental reality that applies to the Dane brothers, after all, their vision of the world is gradually consumed as the way we look at their work. Three years ago, after the release of "The Nameless Girl" in Cannes, he wrote with regret and irony that "the Dane brothers personally sacrificed themselves to prove how dangerous it is to imitate the Dane brothers to make a film", and now when I examine the new work with the same standards, I have become much happier, and I look forward to meeting again next time.