Jean-Pierre Dardenne

The Dardenne brothers’ worst film in memory has a tour de force performance by French actress Adèle Haenel.

Belgium/France
3*

Directors:
Luc Dardenne
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Screenwriters:
Luc Dardenne
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Director of Photography:
Alain Marcoen

Running time: 110 minutes

Original title: La fille inconnue

Jenny initially seems like a professional, but then she sticks her nose in where it doesn’t belong, screws up an important police investigation and commits ethically questionable practices in the course of her launching her own amateur probe à la Nancy Drew, quickly diminishing she standing she had at the outset.

By the end of the The Unknown Girl, the latest film by Belgium’s famous social-realist filmmaker brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, everything is tied up neatly with a bow, and those primed to accept it will forgive the film its faults.

But before we reach the end, there is a whole lot to be irritated by, and even the dynamite performance of the gifted lead actress, Adèle Haenel, cannot save this from being one of the worst fiction films the experienced Dardennes have ever produced.

At the start of the film, a woman is found murdered on the side of the river in the city of Liège, across the road from a doctor’s office, where Jenny Davin, a young but dedicated doctor, has recently taken over and is making great strides in her career. On the night of the murder, Jenny is at the office lecturing her intern about the importance of setting one’s emotions aside lest they cloud the diagnosis of a patient. When the door buzzer sounds, she coldly explains that it is too late in the evening and that, if it were truly an emergency, the person would buzz again.

The next day, she learns that the deceased had been the same person who rang the buzzer moments before her death. Naturally, this news fills her with a sense of culpability. But what she does for the rest of the film becomes more and more difficult to empathise with, particularly because her actions stand in such stark contrast with (and change so quickly from) her earlier approach of prudence and professionalism.

Shot mostly as single-take scenes with a handheld camera, The Unknown Girl has a gritty visual aesthetic that closely mirrors the one on display in all of the brothers’ other award-winning films. Every one of the duo’s feature films since their 1996 début, La promesse, has been shot by Alain Marcoen.

It is easy to convince oneself that Jenny’s sharp focus on investigating the crime and discovering the identity of the girl has merit, particularly because a resolution would almost certainly bring closure and return things to normal. Over time, however, Jenny’s behaviour becomes more and more unprofessional, to the point that she even tells someone in desperate need of medical attention that she will only be available an hour later – the reason being that she deems her mission to collect information to be more important than delivering life-saving assistance.

As far as we can tell, Jenny has no professional background in tracking down criminals or solving crimes. That is what the police is for, and while this is only one of the items on their roster and their progress is not as swift as she would like, they have infinitely more experience. After all, by looking into the matter they are doing their job, whereas Jenny is abnegating hers.

The narrative is built on small details revealed along the way. Primarily, they involve one of her clients, a teenage boy named Bryan (Louka Minnella), who suffers from chronic indigestion, whose assistance in tracking down the person responsible for the title character’s death becomes less and less credible with every passing moment, even though Jenny persists, Columbo-like, in questioning him to the point of harassment.

It is thoroughly surprising that the directors would allow a great many of the answers to simply fall into Jenny’s lap. In a city of 200,000 people, there have to be many coincidences to solve this mystery, and they rain down upon her like manna from heaven. Almost all of her suspicions turn out to be well-founded, and we are compelled to believe that her decision to take time off from work in order to prowl the streets looking for persons of interest is praiseworthy because she moves ever closer to the truth. This kind of storytelling lulls the viewer into a sense of comfort that does not reflect the real world the Dardennes have taken care to reconstruct through their work, and it is a big disappointment to have to witness such flimsy filmmaking in this case.

And yet, if you can look past the lack of narrative complexity and the foolhardy behaviour of the central character, the film’s use of situations in which the main character enters forbidden spaces – a common trope in the Dardennes’ films – is executed with enough distance so as not to appear calculated even though the effect on the viewer is genuine anxiety for the character.

The Unknown Girl suggests that the revered filmmakers are slipping into a comfort zone and are no longer challenging themselves, and that is a real shame because the tour de force performance they wring out of Haenel is nothing short of mesmerising. If their story had received similar care, this would have been a much more satisfying film.

Viewed at the Be2Can 2016 Film Festival.

Belgium
4.5*

Directors:
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Luc Dardenne
Screenwriters:
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Luc Dardenne
Director of Photography:
Alain Marcoen

Running time: 87 minutes

Original title: Le Gamin au vélo

The young Cyril has a very scientific mind, but this creates plenty of problems when he is faced with real-world problems that involve emotions. He doesn’t trust whatever anyone else says, unless he has seen it with his own eyes. At least, that is the case with the bicycle he assumed his father would never sell. But now, not only the bicycle but his father, too, have disappeared, and it takes a while for him to accept that they are both gone and that it was his father’s own decision to break the promise. It is interesting to note an early scene, however, in which Cyril is asked whether his father told him he was leaving. Cyril, without missing a beat, says he did, but that he can’t remember exactly what he was told.

Cyril is a character of flesh and blood, even though some early scenes may make the viewer shake her head in dismay at his foolhardy refusal to accept what he is told by others. His reaction is often to lash out, or, as in the scene where he lies about his own knowledge of his father’s actions, it seems he finds it easier to lie to himself. His own actions are not easily predictable, and this is exactly what makes him interesting.

In an early scene, he goes to the building where his father used to live but when no one answers the door and he refuses to leave the premises and the guardians from his boarding school come looking for him, he races through the building and ends up at the medical centre, where he latches onto a woman he doesn’t know for dear life. She is a hairdresser named Samantha, and she decides to look after him over weekends since he doesn’t have anyone else.

Why she does this is a mystery, a question Cyril asks her directly but which she answers with “I don’t know.” That would be fine, except that it comes almost immediately after another, slightly creepy scene in which the area’s greasy teenage drug dealer, Wes, invites Cyril to his room to drink and play video games. We don’t know what Wes’s intentions are, not what Samantha’s are beyond what we can assume is her desire to look after someone besides herself. And we can assume that Wes doesn’t want to engage with Cyril except to use him in one of his criminal schemes, but why does he leer at him while Cyril’s not looking?

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who directed The Kid with a Bike, seem to be implying that Wes and Samantha are actually quite similar at first, and may act with the same intention (in this case, perhaps, selfishness), but as both stories develop, we see their trajectories and end games clearly diverge, and maybe that is where the complexity is to be found.

Cyril’s father, Guy, is cast perfectly and played by Jérémie Renier, who looks more like a young adult than a full-grown adult. He is not a bad guy who has forsaken his son out of ill will; on the contrary, he is scared and we learn it was actually his own mother who had taken care of Cyril. When she died, he didn’t have enough faith in himself and continues to shirk his parental responsibility. He is a nice person and certainly has more in his head than the character Renier played in the Dardennes’ The Child (L’Enfant), but he is still immature, and the moment when he asks Samantha to tell Cyril he won’t see him any more instead of doing it himself is one of the dramatic highlights of the film.

What makes this all the more poignant is that nearly the entire scene leading up to that moment, the three or four minutes that Guy spends with Cyril in the kitchen and during which he is very accommodating and never rude or disrespectful, are shot almost entirely in a single take, heightening the tension and the intimacy of the exchange.

There are points in the film when we almost want to throw up our hands in despair and exasperation at the hysterical tantrums of the boy who is going through a rough patch in his childhood and has to learn how to cope with his new life. Late in the film, we find ourselves sympathising with him in a scene that recalls Alex DeLarge’s confrontation with the two policemen (and his former gang members) in A Clockwork Orange, when he wants to fight back but finds himself unable to do that because he has changed.

This perspective brings a disturbing twist to our interpretation of the film (Beethoven, DeLarge’s favourite composer, has a piece on the soundtrack of The Kid with a Bike that is repeated at regular intervals, his Piano Concerto, No. 5, Adagio un poco mosso), but while Kubrick and the Dardenne brothers are completely different kinds of filmmakers, neither of them are content with easy answers.

In the end, we cannot know to what extent Cyril has really grown up. He is still quite young, Wes may be looking for him, and he puts enormous pressure on any relationship Samantha may have with other men. Despite these hanging questions, the ending is strong and satisfying but certainly not sentimental. This is a Dardenne brothers film, after all.

Celluloid Paradiso

The Unknown Girl (2016)

The Kid with a Bike (2011)