Undescribable Perfection

Best movie ever!

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

On the surface, The Son, the 2002 effort from the Dardenne brothers, concerns itself with a carpenter and his relationship with one of his students. The new student is a juvenile delinquent who got into trouble five years prior for stealing a car radio, and in the process killed the carpenter's son; the carpenter recognizes the young boy but the student does not know whose son he killed. This sounds like the set up for melodrama, in which the carpenter takes his bloody revenge, but in the hands of the Dardennes the film becomes a religious parable about what it means to be human.What moved me the most about the film, beyond the empathetic qualities of the acting and the writing, was the humanity of the storytelling and its implications. The stance of the minimalist camera is hard to pin down. Though seeming to be a contradiction, there is an absence of perspective, or even perception, in the movie. The compositions seem to stem from a non- existent entity. In that way it is as if god is holding the camera. The shots remain in a medium- close-up, usually positioned behind the actors. Common practice, especially in Hollywood, is to frame a character, face towards the camera to allow the audience to directly read the actor's emotions. Such a method implies that people identify with others based on their emotional readout. Yet in The Son, the inverse is true. Odd as it sounds, we recognize the characters as even more human even though we don't see them emoting; perhaps because, the film suggests, that to be human is not necessarily to emote or even to communicate but to be a contained entity capable of benevolence. The carpenter is a prime example. He mirrors Jesus not only in profession but also in forgiving mankind for its sins - in this case forgiving the young boy for killing his son. Yet the carpenter did not come to such a conclusion easily, which is why we are so moved when he does. The death of his son ruined his marriage and is probably the root cause for his bad back, a metaphor for his bottled up pain. At one point in the film, he even bullies the boy into confessing his crime. Before his salvation, he succumbs to temptation; in other words he is human. Unlike most films that derive from a dramatic fantasy, The Son is about life and life lived. If we are to remain with each other, we must treat each other with humanity. If bad things happen to us, we should accept them. If we are presented with a tough situation, we should transcend the possibility to do evil. The Son is not a film with a message; it is a film to live by.

This film really challenged me. It made me reconsider my well-worn habits of movie viewing, my lazily rendered moviegoer inclinations. Utterly mundane in its realism, a slice of life if there ever was one, "The Son" by brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, is a film about forgiveness, the kind buried deep within the dull folds of a man's tedious day-to-day existence. Oliver is a stern, expressionless carpentry teacher at a trade school for reformed youth transitioning into civil society. His thick glasses obscure his eyes, nonetheless his presence is startling in its austerity. A new student, Francis, becomes enrolled, one that Oliver takes a bizarre interest in, to the point of obsessively monitoring him both in and outside the workshop. At this point in the film I'm thinking to myself: "So is this guy a pedophile? Is he looking to molest this kid?" I had much to learn. As the movie progresses we learn that Oliver's young son was killed by Francis, an incident that happened five years prior, with which both he and his estranged wife are still coping. After learning this, all of Oliver's actions take on a different meaning. They are now to be scrutinized in a compassionate, yet discerning way. Up to this point I had been desperately trying to apply tried and true suspense scenarios to this film, which never did stick. Oliver treats this boy like a son, however Francis is completely oblivious to the man's knowledge of his crime. He pays special attention to the boy's improvement. He is demanding, yet fair in his disposition. He eventually takes Francis out to a remote lumberyard so that he may learn to recognize different types of wood. Now I'm all: "Oh man, he's totally going to exact sweet, sweet revenge!"Here again I was thinking too simply. What follows is an elegantly paced final sequence, one that moved me beyond words. There are many things that make this film work. There is no musical score, only the harsh sounds of power tools and clacking wood. There are hardly any cuts. A hand-held camera follows Oliver around voyeuristically at very close range, almost always over his shoulder. The viewer becomes part of the guilt-ridden cloud of claustrophobia strangling a broken man's conscience. The plot arc is pretty flat-line, but the amount of nuance in the acting is breathtaking. Most of the time Oscar and Francis are completely deadpan, yet the subtlest mannerisms imbue these characters with hyper-realistic depth. This film is slow, but skillfully so. In the first half we are subjected to the minutiae of carpentry instruction, slightly enticed by Oliver's strange behavior towards Francis. But once we come to learn about the murder of Oliver's son, the behavior that was once dull suddenly becomes lush with significance. I was rapt with anticipation from then on out, dissecting each twitch and gesture.This film really captivated me, but above all made me a more mature audience member.

There are only so many ways to cinematically tell a story, so when we see one that seems new, it charms. The overall value may be worthless — I think this is — but the manner of telling has charm.What we have is a camera tethered to a man, who I guess is in his mid-thirties. There isn't frame that doesn't include him somehow. The camera watches him obsessively: his hands, neck, back. No motion or stance is too minor to evade the lingering camera. No strange behavior or any behavior at all escapes.Meanwhile he is a furtive obsessive. He is a carpentry instructor. One should probably say trainer as he drills his teen students on minute movements for each task. He is obsessive in his own life, doing things with exaggerated precision. In another context, we may cry foul because of actorly overshowing. But the "showing" seems genuinely rooted in the character.We encounter him in a particularly furtive effort. We don't know what the episode involves until later, but it seems to involve a new boy.He peers. He sneaks, he spies and is remote. We eventually discover why — a haunting event from five years prior.Now here's the trick. While we watch him with obsession, the entire film from beginning to end and beyond, is about his watching this boy. While he discovers and accepts this boy in his life, we do the same for him. Its classic folding: as we see him open, we subconsciously do.Unfortunately, we are left with thin rewards for opening our hearts. Because in the end, his character is defined to be valuable for the storytelling method, not the story itself. He doesn't matter.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

I've seen "le Fils" close to ten times, each time watching it expecting to perhaps not be hit the same way but that seems to me a useless exercise and I end up just watching it rapt, until it hits me even stronger than the time before. I just can't get over the power of simplicity these filmmakers have brought to their past few films, "Rosetta", "le Fils" and "l'Enfant", which work like a trilogy of profound human sadness, suffering, hope, and finally redemption. On the surface, "le Fils" acts as a thriller about a man and his apprentice. But one of the greatest power in the story is the brother's unwillingness to give the audience obvious and expository dialog right off the bat. We learn, much like the protagonist, of his troubling connection to the boy in carefully planned but seemingly immediate shots designed only to allow the information the directors choose to allow the audience to see, one small segment at a time.