News Feature by Mike Bartlett
On the eve of the release of their latest Cannes-winning effort, L’Enfant, brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne convened at the National Film Theatre in London for a masterclass on their work. Perhaps the first thing that springs to mind when thinking of their films is the grim set of locations they use: housing shelters, dirty suburban streets, caravan parks, unemployment centres. No filmmakers anywhere generate such beauty from such drab environments. Little wonder, then, that the first question the brothers are asked is where they find these places. And it’s equally unsurprising that they already know them intimately – they’re part of the landscape surrounding their home town of Liege, Belgium.
But what is surprising is that these most socially-committed of films begin with an image. Luc explained how, during the making of The Son, they had seen a woman pushing her baby around in a pram, apparently aimlessly, returning to the same spots over and over again. The image haunted both brothers for days afterwards until it pushed itself forward as the germ of a story. From there, they bandied around ideas until Luc, the writer of the family, began the first of a series of drafts – it’s striking how much scriptwriting goes into a film that feels so loose and improvised.
Comparisons have been drawn between L’Enfant and the work of Robert Bresson, and the final moments of the film certainly recall those of Pickpocket (1959) (and Paul Schrader’s more conscious homage, Light Sleeper) when the protagonist kisses his girlfriend through the bars of a prison. But the brothers wince at this suggestion – they’ve heard it just once too often! – and assert that the scene came about because it engraved itself onto their minds – again as an image – before the scriptwriting process began. They do admit, however, to sharing Bresson’s preoccupation with “an economy of means”, ie. in telling their story with the barest of essentials. They, too, see the filmmaking process as one of paring away detail and unnecessary plot points, of concentrating on what is not shown rather than what is. It’s curious how many of the truly great directors concur on this in interviews…
Another point on which they agree is in the treatment of actors. Hitchcock playfully referred to them as “fodder”, but he was the exception to the rule in that his films were meticulously planned out on storyboards before shooting began and actors were just one element in the realisation of his designs. The Dardennes, on the other hand, deliberately encourage their cast to improvise and spend long periods of rehearsal in their chosen locations before the technical crew even get a look-in. As Jean-Pierre ruefully noted, this often upsets the DOP (Director of Photography) because the lighting has to be based around the movement of the actors, rather than in mainstream cinema, where the opposite is usually true. He also revealed that the mise-en-scene is not lit by available light, as it appears to be, and that the naturalistic feel of their movies is a cunning subterfuge wrought by careful planning.
All in all, the masterclass revealed two men committed to stories about poverty and social breakdown but also to ideals of cinema and story-telling that put their work at the forefront of modern European film. They were also extremely good company!
L’Enfant is due for release on March 10th when Close-Up Film will be looking more closely at their work and appraising their extraordinary career so far.
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