Rassegna stampa di Luc Dardenne

FROM the very first jittery shots in “Rosetta” of a teenage girl rushing through an antiseptic hall, the sounds of her heavy breathing and hurried footfalls filling the soundtrack, the directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne had the audience enraptured. It was the final weekend of the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, when the Dardennes swooped in to seduce critics and jurors alike and walk away with the Palme d’Or. Six years later the Belgian brothers — Luc is 55, Jean-Pierre, 58 — conquered Cannes once more, winning its top prize for “L’Enfant,” a story about a young man who, with breathtaking casualness, sells his newborn.
Since their 1996 breakthrough, “La Promesse,” their first feature to attract significant attention off the festival circuit, the brothers have become influential enough that their last name now functions adjectivally. To say that a film shows their influence is to invoke not just a series of visual reference points, most notably the hand-held cinematography, but a distinct moral universe that feels every bit as urgent as the deceptively unadorned style. With a distilled narrative and a closely attentive camera, the Dardennes offer up characters, often members of what might be called the struggling classes, who are humanized through their choices. In “La Promesse” the son of a criminal atones for his father’s sins; in “The Son” a grieving father redeems himself.

More of a tendency than a movement, their imprint is most conspicuous in those films that owe a strong visual debt to the brothers, including the 2008 American independent feature “Ballast” and the 2006 British drama “London to Brighton,” both of which hinge on marginalized figures.
Beyond “L’Enfant”: The Complete Dardenne Brothers, a valuable series that begins at the Walter Reade Theater in Manhattan on Wednesday and runs through June 2, provides an excellent opportunity to chart the Dardennes’ own evolution as filmmakers. Fresh from Cannes, where they were asked to teach a master class, the brothers will be at the Walter Reade on Friday for a public discussion of their work with the critic Kent Jones.
The Dardennes’ style is often described as documentarylike, a fairly useless depiction considering that nonfiction cinema is broad enough to embrace Errol Morris’s meticulous recreations and Michael Moore’s slop ’n’ chop docs. And most of the Dardennes’ own documentaries, which they began making for Belgian television in the 1970s, look nothing like their fictional work. Take for example the unexpectedly engrossing 1980 short “Pour Que la Guerre S’Achève, les Murs Devaient S’Écrouler” (“For the War to End, the Walls Had to Come Down”). Although it was shot in Liège, Belgium, the industrial city where they live and near where they have shot all their fiction features since “Rosetta,” the documentary calls self-conscious attention to its form in the way their recent fictions do not.
In a short introduction made around the time the video was produced, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, wearing a grin and a fluffy Afro, explains that it’s “about working-class memory in the Liège region.” The main conduit to that remembrance is a “militant worker,” Edmond, who, after the general strike of 1960, helped start a newspaper called La Voix Ouvriére. Using archival footage and original material — including images of Edmond reminiscing as he walks the city’s bleak streets and wanders into one of its shuttered factories, sometimes accompanied by “The Internationale” — the Dardennes create a vivid portrait of one man who becomes a manifestation of the collective. In several rapid montage sequences they also add the sounds of ricocheting bullets to the strike imagery.
With its emphasis on an isolated human figure moving through an urban landscape, the documentary points to their later fictions. Yet what also bridges the early and later work is, as the emphasis on workers’ own voices suggests, the problem of enunciation. One of the crucial questions in documentary is who speaks for whom, particularly when filmmakers are separated from their subjects by critical differences like class and race. The Dardennes don’t so much as speak for Edmond but through him as he guides them across the city and into the past. At one point the narrator suggests that cinema is inadequate to the historical task with the comment-question “The eye of the camera always opens too late?”
The Dardennes shifted to directing fiction with their experimental 1987 feature “Falsch,” an adaptation of an autobiographical play by the Belgian writer René Kalisky, whose father died at Auschwitz. With its steady framing, smooth camerawork and self-conscious artificiality (a white actor in blackface, among other touches), it bears little resemblance to their more famous titles. Set in an apparently abandoned airport that looks as if it might have been designed by the French director Jean-Jacques Beineix around the time he made “Diva” — complete with neon signs, roller skating and liberal splashes use of Yves Klein blue — it centers on a Jewish man visited, or more truly haunted, by the ghosts of his relatives, all of whom were murdered in the Holocaust.
By the time the Dardennes directed “La Promesse” a decade later, they had abandoned this quasi-Brechtian mode for a more accessible approach to narrative. This has brought them a wider though by no means a mass audience, including in America, where the most foreign aspect of their work might be the desperation — economic but also moral — of its characters. In films like “The Son” and their latest, “The Silence of Lorna,” which is set to open July 31 in the United States and pivots on an Albanian immigrant, the Dardennes hold a mirror to a world rarely seen by Hollywood and its commercial ilk. It is a world of commonplace injustice that the Dardennes transform with their reverence for the miracle of everyday grace.
Da The New York Times, 24 maggio 2009

Quando Rosetta vinse la Palma d'oro a Cannes nel 1999, l'anno in cui Pedro Almodóvar portava Tutto su mia madre, la scelta venne attribuita all'eccentricità del presidente della giuria David Cronenberg. Che ancora oggi si discolpa: «Non fu affatto la mia volontà, ma quella unanime degli altri membri. Il film venne proiettato l'ultimo giorno, alle 5 della sera, molti giornalisti erano già partiti, e l'effetto fu sorprendente» raccontava nei giorni scorsi sulla Croisette. Ora che i favolosi Luc e Jean-Pierre Dardenne hanno fatto il bis con L'enfant, forse comincerà a conoscerli anche un pubblico più ampio di quello cinefilo, per il quale sono semplicemente «les Frères».

È difficile immaginare qualcuno più lontano dalla scena glamour hollywoodiana. I Dardenne, simpatici, sorridenti, elusivi, sono nati in Belgio nel 1951 (Jean-Pierre) e nel 1953 (Luc), in una regione industriale sulle rive della Meuse. Il padre era l'unico non operaio della comunità, tutti i vicini lavoravano nell'industria meccanica Cockerill, a Seraing. I luoghi che da sempre ispirano i loro film. Ai quali non sono arrivati precocemente: «Da bambini non andavano spesso al cinema perché non c'era a Engis, dove abitavamo» ha raccontato il padre Lucien. «Ma ogni ultimo dell'anno io e mia moglie portavamo i nostri quattro ragazzi a Liegi a vedere un cartone animato».
L'incontro importante della loro vita è stato quello con Armand Gatti, leggenda del teatro francese, anarchico, amico di Mao Zedong e Che Guevara. Dopo una serie di documentari dedicati alla resistenza antinazista, allo «sciopero del secolo» nell'industria metallurgica belga del 1960-61, alle radio libere, approdano al lungometraggio. I loro titoli sono lapidari: Falsch (parola tedesca); Je pense a vous, ambientato tra i siderurgici di Seraing; La promesse, una storia di padri e figli che arriva alla Quinzaine des réalisateurs e sancisce il loro successo di critica; l'indimenticabile Rosetta, la ragazza respinta ai margini che lotta invano per ritrovare un posto nella società; Il figlio; e ora Il bambino (sui nostri schermi nella prossima stagione).
«È la storia di un ragazzo e una ragazza che vivono una storia d'amore complicata. A Bruno, il protagonista, capita di diventare padre» raccontano a turno, gli occhi chiari intelligenti, e sicuri della loro scelta artistica fuori norma. Bruno, vent'anni, vive di piccoli furti e del sussidio della sua ragazza Sonia. Ha talmente poca coscienza della sua paternità che arriva a vendere Jimmy, suo figlio. Senza preoccuparsi di Sonia: «Ho pensato che ne avremmo potuto fare un altro» le dice. Ma qui inizia il suo calvario di colpa ed espiazione, perché L'enfant è un film dostoevskiano. «Bruno e Sonia sono due bambini che giocano. L'enfant è il piccolo Jimmy, ma soprattutto Bruno, che deve crescere. L'amore forse glielo permetterà».
Il loro stile è semplice. La macchina da presa sta addosso ai protagonisti, tagliando tempi morti e creando un'atmosfera quasi da thriller. «La semplicità non richiede grandi ragionamenti ma un lavoro concreto con gli accessori, i ritmi degli attori, il tempo di uno sguardo. Tutto deve essere come una partitura musicale». E a chi gli chiede perché parlano sempre di poveri rispondono: «Il bello nel cinema è che ciascuno può scegliersi i personaggi che vuole».
Da Panorama, 27 maggio 2005