The Son (Le Fils), released in 2002, is the third major fiction film from Belgian auteurs Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. While it bears similarities to the Dardennes’ earlier vérité chronicles of working class life, this haunting, compact film sidesteps sociopolitical commentary in favor of a humanistic story that is independent of time and place.
Olivier (Olivier Gourmet) teaches carpentry at a juvenile reentry center in a poor, unnamed Belgian city. When a young man named Francis (Morgan Marinne) enters the system, Olivier becomes strangely obsessed and begins trailing him through the halls of the center and the back alleys of the city. Francis is quietly desperate for adult guidance, and asks Olivier to join the carpentry class. Olivier refuses, but continues to spy on Francis. For the film’s first half-hour, there is no explanation for Olivier’s behavior. You wonder if you’re watching Death in Venice Belgium.
*Spoiler warning*
Then, in an almost offhand way, the Dardennes make the big reveal: five years earlier, Francis killed Olivier’s son during a botched robbery. Francis is unaware that Olivier is his victim’s father, but Olivier is all too aware of the connection.
Olivier, burdened by contradictory desires for forgiveness and revenge, allows Francis into his class. As he and Francis develop a relationship, Olivier’s moral dilemma becomes a source of almost unbearable suspense. The film’s last act, in which Olivier drives Francis to an isolated lumberyard, will literally stop your breath.
The Son is beautifully shot in an intense vérité style. For most of the film, the camera follows Olivier as if it were mounted to his right shoulder. The Dardennes eschew a soundtrack or musical score, using a cacophony of passing cars, banging hammers and whining buzz saws to emphasize Olivier’s raging moral conflict. As tension builds in several scenes, so does the ambient noise.
Darren Aronofsky clearly had the Dardenne brothers in mind when he made The Wrestler, though, in this writer’s opinion, he merely cribbed their visual and aural style to add some vérité credibility to a trite script. He doesn’t come close to emulating the unadorned psychological realism that is effortlessly displayed in The Son.
Like The Wrestler, many critics have called The Son a Christian allegory. While no one has explicitly spelled out the nature of this allegory, one possible interpretation would be that Olivier represents God, his dead son represents Jesus, and Francis, the son’s murderer, represents humanity at the mercy of a force that can destroy it or forgive it.
