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April 13, 2006

La Promesse

Threats and Promises

By Andrew

"Is that a promise or a threat?" The question is usually rhetorical, meant as a smart-ass remark or action movie cliché. But if you wanted to take the question seriously, La Promesse [1996] would not be a bad place to begin answering it. The film depicts a world full of promises and threats as it follows the story of a young boy who must learn to tell between the two.

The young boy is Igor (Jérémie Renier), the son of a slumlord named Roger (Olivier Gourmet) who keeps an apartment full of undocumented immigrants. France holds out these immigrants a promise of a better future, but that future is precarious; the gamble they make is represented by the constant high-stakes card games they play. The livelihood of Roger is staked on canceling out these promises through constant threats of eviction and deportation. The livelihood of Igor is staked on the promises of Roger; he runs so many errands for Roger that he is forced to abandon an apprenticeship as an auto mechanic. But Roger also insists on showing his son a good time — he takes him to bars for karaoke, buys a friendship ring to signify their bond, and even works every now and again on a tattoo on Igor's arm.

The film follows Igor as he comes to learn how precarious his father's good times are, and what cruelty the good times are inevitably predicated on. Igor witnesses an undocumented employee, Amidou (Rasmane Ouedraogo), fall from a scaffold; he also witnesses his father's frenzied reaction, who is overcome with fear at the threat the man's death poses to his illegal enterprises. But before his father even arrives on the scene, Igor promises to a dying Amidou that he will look after Amidou's newly arrived wife, Assita (Assita Ouedraogo), and their young infant. Igor's promise inevitably comes up against the schemes of his father, and he and Assita must flee. But Igor's largest dilemma is within himself: how can he bring himself to tell Assita of Amidou's fate? Is the truth a threat or a promise?

The question of threats and promises is often cliché, and La Promesse could have been its own cliché. All I knew about La Promesse before seeing it were vague ideas I picked up here and there: that it was French and somehow "realist" — meaning it was not highly done up with fancy camera work and editing. Like Bresson, I figured. Granted, of all of Robert Bresson's acclaimed films, I have seen only L'Argent, and it mostly left me bored, cold, and confused. Still, the film did cast a certain spell on me, which I suppose it the "spiritual" dimension critics love in Bresson's work. I couldn't stop thinking about doorways for a week (see the film and you'll understand). I read in the last issue of Cieneaste that Susan Sontag lauded Bresson's films for demanding an inordinate amount of discipline from the viewer, and she's right. But discipline almost sounds like a threat to me, and as to seeing another Bresson film anytime soon, I've hardly been hot to trot.

But La Promesse might have changed my mind. Maybe French realism promises more than speculative boredom. Watching La Promesse, I realized how realism breaks so many of most of cinema's would-be promises. The visuals are plain, not razzle-dazzle, and the soundtrack is full of everything — conversations, echoes of a hallway, the screeches of a subway — everything but music. In forcing us to confront a social dilemma, realism reveals that schlocky conventions of Hollywood blockbusters are rarely promises. Instead, they are threats, to both our own consciences and critical thinking. I was not completely sure of the importance of realism's premises until La Promesse's final scene, a scene that leaves in wonder and reflection where a Hollywood picture would leave us with a neat and clean resolution.

Still, by virtue of being a movie, "realism" is never reality. The bare style of La Promesse, or Bresson, or any number of realist films, serves to focus our attention on certain elements within the picture: namely the story and its dilemmas. But we must remember that realist stories and their dilemmas are usually scripted, and even if unscripted, always acted (professionally or otherwise). For instance, in La Promesse, the practices of Assita's religion are obviously meant to be something of an analogy to Igor's conscience. In American films, Black characters often serve as two-dimensional mediums for whatever struggle the white lead is going through (one example would be the Magical Negro). I'm unsure of whether Assita's rituals could be seen as a sort of French counterpart to this trend, even as the film elicits our sympathy for the struggles of the undocumented. Whatever the case, it is a reminder that all films, even fine ones like La Promesse, have their own share of promises and threats, and that it is primarily through efforts outside the movie theater — political struggle especially — that viewers learn to tell the difference between the two.

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