Estimated reading time: 32 min
Beginning with 1996's The Promise (1996), each of the new films of the two brothers, Belgian directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, has been filled with joy and anticipation. Their latest work, The Silence of Lorna (2008), premiered at Cannes, did not generate as enthusiastic responses as some of their previous films, such as the 2005 Palme d'Or winner The Child (2005). But while some find the film's narrative lengthy and rambunctious, the Dane brothers resonate with the story of a young Albanian immigrant who is trying to redeem himself and is in a dilemma. As in "A Promise of Gold", the film focuses on how the "other" uses illegal means to try to enjoy material benefits within eu countries – in this case, specifically, obtaining EU citizenship through improper means. This time, the brothers set their cameras in the more gentrified city of Liège instead of their hometown, the dirty industrial city of Thurling. Rolna obtains Belgian citizenship by shaming marriage to the addict Claudy (Jeremy Renier, the dane brothers' royal actor Jeremy Renier). A goon who manipulated the local union premeditated to get rid of Claudy by regularly overdose in order to remarry Lorna and a Russian mafia, thus obtaining the latter's status as a Belgian citizen. But when Claudie is about to take the poison again, the two men ignite the spark of love and suddenly stand on the same front.
In late May and early June 2009, the Lincoln Center Film Society held a retrospective exhibition called "Beyond the Kids: The Complete Works of the Dane Brothers." The film includes several of these, as well as several social and political documentaries that brought the brothers to prominence in the 1980s, as well as two of their early feature films, Falsch (1987), the theatrical Falsch (1987) and the relatively traditional Je pense à vous (1992) in 1992. The Dane brothers' latest film, Rolna's Silence, will be released later this year. I met the Dane brothers at Lincoln Center in New York, hence the following interview.
Bert Cardullo: Where is your office?
Jean-Pierre Dardenne :In Liège, close to where we made our films. We shot the same location when we made the documentary. These are places we have known since childhood and are part of our local consciousness. In fact, in the drama, we've downplayed the importance of these scenes because it's an industrial city — it's dangerous to use them as a backdrop, because they create a magic in themselves that we don't want to dominate and steal the limelight from the characters.
Bert: You've been doing documentaries for years. Can you talk a little bit about the change from non-fiction to fiction? How did you coordinate the transition from documentary to feature film production?
Jean-Pierre: Documentaries and feature films communicate with audiences in different ways. When watching a documentary, the audience realizes that the characters do have their own people in reality, and the story is really happening to them. But if you're watching a drama and you see a character killed, you know that after they've done the scene, the person who was killed will get up and walk away. Still, the feature film allows you to move in a direction that is not allowed in real life: in "A Promise," for example, you see a character in the film who kills a man and then buries him. It's certainly something you can't see in a documentary.
Luc Dardenne : Our early approach to filmmaking — that method is not related to the way we work now. We didn't keep any of the earlier ways. What we retain is the characters and characters that we shot in the early years. We photographed hundreds of people in this place where we used to live and went into their daily lives.
They've been videotaped and erased, but when we're shooting a feature film, we might ask, "Do you remember what that person said?" "The early films were films about memory, movies about the past. The few archives document the workers' movement in the region – we want to capture the way they speak, how they believe they can change society, the society in which they live. These documentaries deal with a dying working class. This class once existed and gradually disappeared. Today, we photograph an individual who lives alone in an area where the economy is collapsing. How do they try to find contact, how do they go to meet other people, how do they get together with another person? It was as if a terrible catastrophe had occurred, and only a few people survived, trying to communicate with each other in order to recreate some kind of community. The main moral question is: Will I kill you for my own benefit? Will I let you have your own life?
JEAN-Pierre: I can say a few more words in order to draw a deeper connection between the documentary and our feature film work. In the documentaries we've done in the past, you've filmed a reality that's external to you, and you can't control that reality — it's rebelling against your camera. You have to shoot it as it is. So we're trying to put this aspect of the documentary in our feature films, to shoot things that are rebelling against us. And we try not to present or observe everything. The characters and situations remain in the shadows. This opacity, this defiance, provides truth and anger to the things we photograph.
Bert: How do you create this situation of rebellion against the camera?
JEAN-Pierre: We put limits on ourselves. For example, when we were working on footage for the trailer for Rosetta (1999), we went out of our way to keep the walls from moving; we wanted all the walls in the trailer to remain the way they were. It's a way to shoot. It's actually an attitude. We don't want to be God — we don't want to dominate everything. We want to keep things in their original state, not to take advantage of them.
Bert: Are there moments in Rosetta that don't happen naturally?
Luc: We shot with a super 16 camera, which allows you to have a lot of long shots; there are some shots that are about 10 minutes long, and there are a lot of 5 to 8 minute long shots. We had the actors rehearse a lot, and we didn't put anything on the floor to get the actors to follow the stage. So even if you rehearse exactly what the actors are going to do next, they won't perform exactly the same way. For example, the last shot in Rosetta, because we're using that kind of way — being open to change, rather than labeling everything — so things happen, tension is formed, because you really don't know what's going to happen when you're shooting. The last scene, we shot about ten times, and we chose the last one, because the more the heroine acted, the more tired she became. The moment she fell to the ground, it was an improvisation as we filmed. We didn't plan to do that before, so it's all happy accidents; even though you rehearsed it, it still has the spontaneity that you don't want to control, but is only somehow aroused.
Bert: Do you think that, on any level, film is a social movement?
LUC: No.
Bert: So, is it entertainment?
LUC: One thing.
JEAN-Pierre: I hope it's also entertaining. Hardly. When you say "social movement", what do you mean?
Bert: By filming the story of this woman Rosetta, you're actually making a movie about unemployment. So that's part of your agenda? Or is the subject simply organically derived from telling her story?
JEAN-Pierre: Yes. Our original idea was to portray this woman as a fighter, a survivor. She truly believed that if she couldn't find a job and didn't have a foothold in this society, she would die. So we have to put ourselves and the camera in such a state of mind. Once you've done that, you have to start dealing with moral issues: to kill or not to kill? Suicide or no suicide? Of course, by doing these jobs, you also begin to describe society and unemployment. We know what we're doing, but the "social movement," as you call it, isn't our primary goal; it's what comes with it, but it's not why we want to make this film.
BERT: Were you political activists when you were young?
JEAN-Pierre: For us, we've always aspired to put people — not necessarily in the political sense — people on the margins of society at the center of the films we make. We weren't political activists, but a couple of the documentaries we did in the early days were portraits of the working class active in the trade unions, communist parties, socialist parties, or Catholic movements.
Luc: The city of Selan was once a vibrant city of the working class, and the workers' movement was once in full swing. But with the crisis of the rolling mill strike movement in the early 1970s, we suddenly saw people like Rosetta and Bruno and Sonia in "Kids", cut off from each other and socially disconnected from their past generations.
Bert: Can you comment on how the handheld cameras in Rosetta are used? It seems to truly reflect the character's obsessive-compulsive symptoms.
JEAN-Pierre: You're right. But it doesn't matter how we use it. The important thing is that you understand how it came to be, and obviously you understand it too.
Bert: Your previous "One Promise" and this film both presented a more crude, somewhat low-budget film. Do you want to make a movie that uses more equipment and a bigger budget — say, with a lift?
Luc: It's a house, and we like to live in it. Making a movie is like a room: you have to feel comfortable in it.
Bert: Why did you choose to make a feature film and leave the documentary? Do you think it makes more sense?
Jean-Pierre: It's more exciting. Because you bring twenty people together into a group, and every morning you bring them together, and you start to give life to these non-beings, the characters themselves don't exist, they not only start to appear before your eyes, but they also get rid of you, and you can't control them anymore. You can't exhaust all possibilities. In a documentary, you meet reality, and you can't manipulate or mix it. It opens up to you the way it was, but in the drama you can manipulate it a little bit.
Bert: How long did Rosetta take?
Jean-Pierre: Eleven weeks.
Bert: It sounds like a long time for such a concise film.
Luc: We spent a lot of film because we made a lot of versions of the same shots. Sometimes we shoot scenes and review the samples, but we're not happy with them, so we go back to the scene and reshoot them. We saved all the footage until the editing was finally complete. We'd rather have the opportunity to reshoot a scene than rent a lift.
Bert: Can you talk a little bit about rosetta sound? The sound of a motorcycle engine, the sound of her breathing, the sound of her footsteps... These are all important to this film. Did you already conceive of these sounds when you were writing the script? Have they always been part of the movie?
Jean-Pierre: On the spot, we started listening to the sound very clearly, and after a week or two, we started to realize how important sound was. For us, it's the most beautiful part of making a movie: when you're shooting, you find those moves, ideas, or simple devices and make them part of the movie.
Bert: Speaking of ideas, how did you come up with the idea of creating rosetta as a character?
Luc: We think of K, the protagonist of Kafka's The Castle. K, who could not enter the castle and was ostracized by the villagers, began to question his existence. This gives us the idea of an abandoned girl who wants something that will allow her to return to society. But she was repeatedly defeated. We decided that she wanted to be like everyone else, get a job and live a normal life. We decided to give this stubbornness and persistence to this role and see where that would lead her. From that point on, we wrote a lot of things and did it many times until we found Rosetta.
Jean-Pierre: We decided to start with a character, not a plot. The idea was to put the viewer in a position where he could ask himself questions: "What's going to happen to her?" And how would she deal with all this that had happened to her? ”
Bert: You said Rosetta was a warrior.
Jean-Pierre: With or without work, this is the main eternal problem that happens to contemporary people. Not going to work, no matter what choices you make, will push you into a marginal position in society. You lose your point of reference, you're not in the system, you can't find your place anymore, even if you still have a position. Work gives you certain obligations and rights. When you stop working, you lose those rights you have. Work becomes a scarce thing. Nothing is left. Getting a job means you have to take someone else's place, and you have to be prepared to do something in order to get the job.
Luc: Rosetta is a warrior who never gives up, and she's always ready to let go. She is a survivor struggling with subsistence: water, shelter, food. She created her own arsenal of weapons, a survival system: boots for going to camp, shoes for work, boxes for bait, bottles for fishing. She was in a hurry and constantly struggled to find a job.
Bert: Why did you let her live in a camp?
Luc: We wanted to put Rosetta in a state of existence that made her feel like she had almost fallen to the bottom.
Bert: How did you create the character of Riquet?
Luc: We spent more time discovering this character than it did to discover Rosetta. He is a straightforward thinker. He told only one story. Rosetta was the opposite: she was watching, she was suspicious, she was peeping through the door, she was always afraid of conspiracy and trickery. For Riquet, it was just a matter of helping others. Riquet said, "I'm here to help you." But Rosetta didn't understand the phrase.
Jean-Pierre: He reappears at the end of the film because he can't accept what she's doing. He came back and pestered her. She had become a bit like his prey. By harassing, he kept her alive. Such a nervous, stubborn, indifferent girl will eventually open her heart to accept help from others.
Luc: From the first shot of the film opening — with our "obsessive-compulsive" camera, as you put it , the audience gets confused.
Jean-Pierre: The first shot of the film has to be both simple and intense to introduce Rosetta, her situation, and her reactions to things. This scene reveals her character traits as a whole. It shows the violence she has suffered and how she has resisted in the same violent way. If you see all this in this scene, then everything that follows will also be clear at a glance.
Luc: Presenting too many things hinders the existence of the characters themselves. The less you say to the character, the stronger the character's presence. So we try not to leak too much. Everything is done with this idea, including scene scheduling and editing. Instead of giving too much to it, we try to discover the key movements of the characters. The most touching thing is that Rosetta is not living in disguise. She fought, ready to do things that didn't seem acceptable in any other environment. She refused to be as pretentious as her mother. Because Rosetta is constantly working against others, she becomes withdrawn and she becomes cold. She had isolated herself from others; something inside her was stronger than hers, perched on her, and she could not control it. Rosetta's attitude towards her mother was striking. Her mother is characterized by decline, and her daughter is terrified of it.
Bert: How long after Rosetta did you get involved in Le fils (2002) in Others?
Luc: Before we finish a film and start a new job, we usually need some time (to conceive and conceive). After Rosetta was done, we wrote the beginning of two stories, and we hesitated between the two. Then we started doing Son of Others, but we abandoned it twice in quick succession and took a break. Finally we came back to work and set it as our next project.
Bert: If I may ask, what is so special about Olivier Gourmet as an actor?
Jean-Pierre: What makes him special is that he is not special at all. He is one of many beings; he could be anyone. He is ordinary. If he's standing among ten people, you probably won't recognize or pick him out. We are interested in his body. He's a little fat, but at the same time very flexible. He was an athlete in his youth. We are also interested in his gaze, his demeanor is very special, and we use his eyes in "Son of Others" to make a fuss. In some positions, whether viewed from the side or from the front, you can almost ignore his eyes. Very special, his eyes were hidden behind his frames. His eyes were actually tiny.
Bert: Did Oliver Goulmay ask you why you were interested in him?
Luc: He did say that he liked to use his body, and he was very fond of physical work. He's the kind of guy who doesn't talk much. Coming from the countryside, he loved the way we worked without much talk. The work on site is very quiet. Our movies don't have too many scripts. Cinema itself contains understanding and understanding, and they do not depend on language.
Bert: How did you develop the story of Son of another?
Jean-Pierre: This film didn't come from an idea. Initially we had some definitive images, and our main goal was to think about how Oliver would welcome his son's killer into his workshop and how the two of them would interact in such an enclosed space. Oliver was attracted to Francis, but he was also panicked, and these were the things that drew us in. At that stage, we decided to set Oliver as a carpenter. This setting helps us tremendously in terms of plot and scenes. That's how we get scenes that use tape measures or ladders. And in these scenarios, the body is always in a state of imbalance. The small camera gives us the impression that Oliver's body is always unbalanced, as if his feet aren't standing on the ground—unlike Rosetta, who has deeply rooted his feet.
Bert: Why do you make your films so minimalist? There is no backstory to tell, the narrative is cut, and there is no music.
Luc: You could say it's a formula. The more subtractions you do in matter, the more mental clutter can manifest. It's just a point of view, but what interests us is getting straight to the point, and for us, the most important thing in the story is doubt, hesitation, and vacillation about whether to kill or not to kill. That's what we think in our heads, and it's the fundamental problem in movies. I'm not so sure, but it makes a lot of things seem less necessary. We explore silence in a different way in Rosetta. In that piece she doesn't have to speak in order to preserve her energy. Silence in this film is more about waiting. You're waiting for something or someone to say, "I regret it," or "I killed your son." We did more subtraction in this film than in other films. For example, the color of Oliver's apartment is the same as that of the carpenter's workshop—there are no photographs in the apartment. It's a more abstract film than Rosetta.
Bert: People often praise your films as spiritual prophecies. Are you educated in Christianity?
Jean-Pierre: Yes, we grew up with a strong Catholic education, and as a teenager we rejected the teachings imposed on us by our father. But as coercive as it is, the Puritan component of religion, and the education we are taught, tells us to see others as human beings. We weren't allowed to watch TV or movies because our fathers thought they were the embodiment of the devil.
Bert: To what extent can we interpret Son of Others as a religious fable?
Jean-Pierre: People often talk to us about this film, so it seems that there must be some truth here. But we wish we hadn't written a script of the Crucifixion. Of course, if you want to interpret it in a certain way, it is real, and this is a religious dimension of interpretation. When Oliver was in the lumber yard, he climbed onto the pile and dropped a thick plank. I don't know how this was done, it must have been an accident – I think one of the actors had to be presented in silhouette – but we had the Father (the Holy Father), there was the Son (the Son), there was the cross (the cross). We shouted "stop" because it was too much.
Bert: But you could have set Oliver as a plumber?
Luc: Death is always there in this film. We never see it, but death is here. Wood is just matter, but it is alive. For a few months, Oliver wanted to be a chef. But we can't grasp it very clearly — we need to have an image, even if it's a little out of focus as the movie is supposed to be. Usually in the scene or scene, we ourselves go to the role, see how things go, and try to shoot from a different perspective. The tape measure isn't just an idea — it's under consideration. Then we can clearly state the story, and if we use the kitchen as the scene, we can't unfold the missing parts of the shot.
Bert: Bruno Dumont, the director of L'Humanite (2000), once said that the film is a dialogue between himself and the audience, does this apply to you?
Jean-Pierre: We've been thinking about it. If someone asks us, if the audience is present, you will be afraid if the audience likes your work, and we answer that we want our film to love the audience, in that sense, it does not mean love or seduction, or to make the audience more stupid. We have a little bit of free space in the frame for the audience to enter the film and prepare themselves. In Son of another, the cameras are close together, and so is Rosetta. But in Rosetta the audience knows what the character is going to do, or what she's looking for. Unbeknownst to Oliver here, the viewer himself will guess that he wants revenge on Francis because the latter killed his son. It's a moral experience where the audience experiences Oliver's experience. Sometimes I hear people say that they at one point felt closer to Francis because he was weaker. It's a shame that a woman said he didn't do anything for her and said "I'm sorry".
Bert Carduro: Your recent films have focused almost obsessively on the protagonists of the films.
Luc: The film was born in a certain scene. During the filming of Son of Others, we saw a young woman pushing a stroller very roughly, as if she were trying to get rid of the baby. This scene resurfaces as we start thinking about our next film. In the end, the missing character, the father of the child, becomes the protagonist. We had discussions before we formed the idea of a father selling his child, but we didn't want to make real action a core element. We wanted to tell the story of a man who had to sell his child first to receive a paternity test.
Jean-Pierre: As I hinted at in my comments on Rosetta, it is important to us that the characters should not be prisoners of the story. They should maintain a sense of autonomy. They are not pawns on a chessboard.
Bert: Do you always have a sense in advance of how you're going to end the movie? Your last few movies have had very powerful endings. Your characters, like you say, are autonomous, and they may lead you in unexpected directions.
Jean-Pierre: For Son of another, we came up with a different ending on the last day. Since we shot in chronological order, we have a sense of how the story should develop and end. In Kids, we knew from the beginning what we wanted, and we kept that consistency in mind as we filmed. We considered the other endings, one of which had long chase shots and shots, but they seemed a little too "risky", too much like a crime or action movie.
Luc: We also don't like to kill our characters, we love them very much. The film we make is like a physical test for the actors, and we want to save them at the end of the film.
Bert: The protagonist of your latest film, Rolna, is an actress from Kosovo, how did you find her?
Jean-Pierre: One of our assistants went to Pristina, Skopje and Tirana to audition for about a hundred young actresses, both professional and non-professional. We chose Arta Dobroshi. We have already seen her in two Albanian films a few weeks ago. We went to Sarajevo where she lived to meet her and we filmed her with DV cameras all day. We filmed her walking, running, singing, and let her perform in scenes similar to our previous films. Then she went to Liège, where we filmed her rivalry with Jeremy Renier and Fabrizio Rongione. She is so amazingly beautiful and natural. In the evening, before she flew back to Sarajevo, we told her that we had chosen her role as Lorna and that she needed to return to Belgium a few months before filming started, rehearsing and learning French.
Bert: Unlike the super 16mm film you shot before, this one was shot with less movement and a 35mm camera with a wider format. Why are you making this change?
Jean-Pierre: We tested five digital cameras, one 35mm and one super 16mm. Images taken at night with 35 mm were the closest to what we wanted for this project. In addition, we have decided that this time, the camera will not be moving all the time, will be less descriptive and limited to recording images. Considering the weight, the 35mm camera is the best for us.
Bert: In your previous works, the camera was only filmed against the character, and in this film, it seems to maintain a certain distance. It can be said that "Rolna's Silence" is characterized by a low-key and simple directorial approach, in fact, since "Rosetta", your camera has gradually "calmed" down in this way.
Luc: We used more distant, static cameras because we wanted to look at this mysterious Lorne and observe her. This is not a film that moves and presents her energy, we don't want to write with the lens as we want to copy it. The film's storyline is undoubtedly the most complex we've ever written about, with Rolna surrounded by four men of different origins — another reason for "observation," a way of looking at each other.
Bert: All of your previous films were set in Serran, the industrially strong town where you spent your childhood. In this film, you have decided to set your story in Liège, a large city, even though it is only a few miles from Seland.
Luc: We agree that Liege is a big city with a lot of people on the streets during the day and at night. For Rolna, the protagonist from Albania, a large European city represents all sorts of hopes. We wanted to see Rolna in the middle of a bustling crowd, physically close to people, but no one knew her secret. Placing Lorna and her secrets in a crowd that knew nothing of her made her look stranger and conveyed a stronger sense of fear and loneliness.
Bert: Despite the impactful side of Rolna's Silence, your film also has a sensual, even sweet, character.
Jean-Pierre: We owe it to Arta, the actress, her face, her voice, the way she moves, the way she speaks French with a special accent. This may also have something to do with our camera's perception of things, and let's not forget that this movie is a love story.
Bert: Could it be that Rolna was based on real life?
Luc: Some of our acquaintances told us the story of Rolna in real life, a fake marriage, but we took her story in different directions.
Bert: How do you work together when directing your films?
LUC: Let's talk about the script. We all come together to choose the actors. The two of us came to work with the actors for a long time on set, without any crew. Then the crew and the director of photography came to work on the spot, and one of us went to the live monitor. Once we start shooting, we discuss and comment in front of the monitor. Then we discuss with the photographer. Let's edit together. It's really no more complicated than when there's only one person.
Bert: Do you do a lot of rehearsals before shooting?
Jean-Pierre: Yes, we do, so we can say the most free when shooting, and we are the least constrained when we are very familiar with the work. In fact, rehearsal is the best moment in all work, and we don't discuss the psychology of the characters. It's a more instinctive thing to do. Rehearsals are like soccer camps. When we shoot, it becomes a football tournament.
Bert: The first scene in "Lorne's Silence" is when Rolna hands over her bills at the bank. The material circulation of money, which is very realistic in the movie. Can you talk about the money that is everywhere in your movies?
Jean-Pierre: Money dominates our relationships with others to some extent, which is not necessarily negative. Money gives you the wealth to change your life, and in this movie, all the characters want to change their lives, and the only way to achieve that in our time is money. Unlike many movies, our movies don't see money as something shameful: we show what it is. It's there. We wanted to portray characters who the audience wouldn't judge as much as they would in real life. Money, after all, can recognize both moral and unethical behavior. The money Rolna saved to open an account for Claudie's child, the fetus in her womb, was good money.
Bert: I found something mysterious about Rolna's transformation. Through the film's many hints, she seems to be irritated by the drug addict Claudine and wants to just blame him. What triggered the change in her feelings for him?
Luc: A slap doesn't make a sound. When she started helping Claudie—for example, helping him get up from the ground—she began to change like a person. She took off her clothes so that he would no longer pursue drugs; she made extreme movements... At the same time, I felt desire. Claudie motioned to her that he could stop, and she felt admiration, and at the same time she felt guilty because they were planning to kill him. But, bottom line, her gesture toward him was mysterious and unexplainable, and in fact, it also confused her. It was as mysterious to her as it was to us.
Bert: Was the whole script planned? Or are you going to change in progress?
Jean-Pierre: In all of our work, we tend to add physical aspects, adding gestures when we shoot and reduce conversations. The actors themselves bring something new; the shooting is organic and changes with the environment. Even so, in this film, the movie you see is very close to the script.
Bert: At the heart of the film is a mystery: Is Rolna's baby real or fictional? Of course, the doctor said there were no children. But the problem remains.
Luc: When we decided not to present Claudy's body, our first thought was to assume that she was pregnant. For Lorne, this Claudine absence is filled by the baby, although the baby is also non-existent. You know, if you're willing to believe she's pregnant, that's okay too. An interesting thing: even in a new scene, when a doctor tells her she's not pregnant, the audience insists she's pregnant. I think it's because the audience wants her to save herself and protect a new life. She is careless about Claudie's life, but she will take care of the baby's life carefully, it represents the future and hope.
Bert: The film presents a harsh picture of Europe.
Jean-Pierre: Even though the film is set in Western Europe, essentially what interests us is the story of people from elsewhere, how they got here, what methods they were willing to use (those that were not praised) to achieve their dreams. Lorne is a self-contradictory person, a woman who doesn't trust everyone but learns to have faith in certain moments. For the story to work, she had to come from a country outside the European Union. She is Albanian, but she can also be Brazilian or Russian. We can't think we can oppose the wave of immigration as we did a decade ago. Today, we are to treat these people in a more fraternal and humane way, and certainly not too naïve to those who hire black workers just to be opportunistic in the times.
Bert: As the film unfolds, you gradually reveal some information. How did you manage to hide information from the audience for so long? To what extent do you risk losing your audience if you do this?
Jean-Pierre: We don't want to lose the audience, but to create a sense of anticipation and encourage the audience to ask questions. This is the first time we've made a film with suspense, and we follow the rules of genre cinema, especially using jump clips, from the very beginning of the film.
Bert: If you look closely, Rolna's plot is no less than any American thriller. It involves mafia, fake identity cards, expedient marriages and murder. Nevertheless, you have managed to maintain your signature stylistic characteristics. How did you manage to stay within the category of "real movies"?
Luc: One of the most important aspects is that Rolna and Fabio don't fit the stereotypes of heroines and gangsters in film noir. Lorne and her boyfriend are immigrants who long for a normal life. We can't say that Rolna is a snake and scorpion beauty, we show that she lives an ordinary daily life. However, there are also aesthetic components of genre films: night, city and rain.
Bert: Each character is distinguished by a prop or a costume: like Rolna's blouse and red pants, Fabio's taxi, and Claudy's envelope.
Jean-Pierre: Some people are more obvious than others. Fabio's taxi is there from the beginning of the film, which is his status and his home, and it appears more obvious during filming. Claudine's envelope is a prop symbolizing his relationship with Rolna. As for the costumes, after a month of work, we decided that Rolna would have a skirt and two pairs of pants, including the red one, which would make her instantly recognizable when she walked around the city!
Luc: She's still a bit heavy, so we asked her to lose weight. The scenes, the walls, the colors – it's all carefully studied and well thought out, so it takes a lot of time. If you're willing to say that, even the floor of the apartment is "designed".
Bert: Here's a question I asked you earlier about Rosetta and social activism. Immigration is one of the themes of this movie? Or is it just a medium to tell the story of the characters?
Luc: Again, it's more about the latter. Obviously we did not draw two parallel lines between them and the "underclass", but the Russian and Albanian mafias do exist. Our heroine is part of this world, but in the beginning she was mostly an economic refugee. For her, Liège was heaven. It was possible that she would find a job, she had made plans to get married, and saved money to want to open a snack bar. Unfortunately, she finds herself at the center of a conspiracy that will be completed at the expense of a man who is considered worthless (because he is a drug addict).
Bert: The film explores a theme that runs through your work: guilt.
JEAN-PIERRE: In short, I would say it's a subject that interests us because when we feel guilty, we become more human. In all of our films, thanks to guilt, the character begins to break out of his or her routine life and begins to change.
Luc: But I would say that the idea of guilt is something that we are prepared to do in order to make sure that we feel bright, which has been reduced to a matter of human nature in our society. Note that for us, this is not at all morbid, and guilt is not narcissistic because it allows us to work toward something better.
Bert: You've separated yourself from the two previous plot points. How would you introduce those two works to audiences who are familiar with your later works?
Jean-Pierre: "Wrong" is like a continuation of a documentary. It was the first time we'd worked with a real actor and we were all a little worried. Looking back at "I Miss You" from the current perspective, we think it was a happy failure. When we moved from documentaries to feature films, it was clear that we had no professional education in film school. It's as if we're well-educated kids who don't want to go against the norm, so we try to respect the usual ways of making feature films. We are afraid, and we are equally afraid of our fears. Sometimes fear can motivate you and keep you going, but here it paralyzes us. In the end it's lucky in the end – it allows us to see that this is not the path we want to go. This gives us the freedom to make the next film.
Luc: I think our style— this freedom for us to work the way we do what we do, really comes from A Promise. In that film, we developed our technology. We shot the first shots on the first day we started and worked chronologically. We try to act as if we've never photographed anything before, and everything starts all over again, and we try to ask, "What do we want to do?" What are we trying to show? ”
Bert: There's also the issue of the subject matter shifting. From the obvious political Cold War documentaries to your recent feature films about atomizing the twenty-first century individual.
Jean-Pierre: It is true that the documentary we made took place in the second half of the twentieth century and dealt with the question of class and the compromise with the postwar generation's struggle between Eastern communism and Western capitalism. Especially in "A Promise of Gold" and "The Silence of Rolna", some characters are unfamiliar with the traditional concepts of Western Europe. They want a better life. One of the characteristics of the past two decades has been the dramatic change in the perception of Western Europe. A lot of people come to Western Europe and try to find a place, but it won't be easy – there was a spiritual barrier in old Europe. This is indeed the most important challenge in Europe right now: how can we integrate with these immigrants and find a place for these individual groups so that they can contribute to the growth of Europe's wealth?
Bert: What's your next project?
Jean-Pierre: We've talked about quite a few projects, but they're always the same! Some plays will emerge. We're lucky because we can do the movies we want — not the ones that your general audience wants to see.
| from Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Cambridge Scholar Press, 2009, pp. 188-204.
| Translation: Chen Xiaobao, Gawe @ Fan Shadow Translation | translation was published in the 4th issue of the "Fan Shadow Journal"
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American literary critic, dramatist, and translator who has worked in the French Forum, the Forum for Modern Language Studies, the Journal of European Studies, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and the Midwest Quarterly Quarterly) and other journals; he has written, edited, and translated books such as Five French Filmmakers, Jean Renoir: Interviews, and Moliere's "Tartuffe: Text and Context."
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