La Promesse

La Promesse (1996) was the international breakthrough of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. It premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes and set the moral and stylistic template the Belgian brothers would follow to two Palmes d'Or and beyond. After years in documentary, this was the film in which they found their voice.

Jérémie Renier, in his debut, plays Igor, an apprentice mechanic and reluctant accomplice to his father's exploitation of migrant workers. Olivier Gourmet is the father and Assita Ouedraogo the widow to whom Igor makes his fateful promise. The Dardennes shoot in what is now their famous mode (handheld, close, present tense, no score) and turn a teenager's crisis of conscience into a taut moral thriller. Its power comes from watching a boy work out, slowly and almost without words, what kind of person he is going to be.

Critics recognised immediately that major talents had arrived, and praised its unsentimental humanism and its refusal of easy resolution. Lean, gripping and ethically serious, La Promesse is one of the essential films of 1990s European cinema. Renier's debut and Gourmet's performance began a long association with the brothers, and the film introduced audiences to the Dardenne method and to the subject they have never left since: the dignity and difficulty of doing right in a world built to discourage it.