the promise (la promesse) 1996 (olivier gourmet, jérémie renier) region free dvd5 french bcbc

La Promesse (English: The Promise) is a 1996 drama film by the Belgian brothers Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne.

Contains movie and Optional English Subtitles. No menus or extras. Regular DVD quality. Thank you.

Spoken Language: French (some Romanian)













Synopsis

Roger (Olivier Gourmet) hires illegal immigrants to work for his construction company, holding their fate in his hands while refusing to pay a living wage. When an accident threatens to expose him, Roger involves his 15-year-old son, Igor (Jérémie Renier), in a web of deceit. Eventually, Igor must choose between loyalty to his father and the promise he made to take care of a young widow (Assita Ouedraogo).



Cast

Jérémie Renier, Olivier Gourmet, Assita Ouedraogo, Jean-Michel Balthazar, Frédéric Bodson, Katarzyna Chrzanowska, Florian Delain, Hachemi Haddad



Movie Review

La Promesse (1996)

October 7, 1996

Immigrants' Plight, Boy's Conscience

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Almost everyone should be able to identify with the wrenching moral quandary facing Igor (Jeremie Renier), the 15-year-old protagonist of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's casually devastating film ''La Promesse.'' A skinny blond youth who has barely entered adolescence, Igor works for his father, Roger (Olivier Gourmet), in a construction business outside Antwerp, Belgium, that employs and ruthlessly exploits illegal immigrants.



The labor force that Roger supervises with an iron hand comes from all over the world. Once the workers have arrived at a building site, which also serves as their housing, they discover that their living expenses, including ''rent,'' groceries and flimsy gas heating are deducted from their wages at gouging prices determined by Roger.



One day when government labor inspectors appear at the site, Hamidu (Rasmane Ouedraogo), an immigrant from Burkina Faso who has recently arrived with his wife, Assita (Assita Ouedraogo), and their baby, tumbles from a scaffold and lies mortally injured. Coming upon him, Igor frantically drags Hamidu out of sight, and in his final words the dying man elicits a promise from the boy to look after his wife and baby.



When Igor begs his father to take Hamidu to the hospital, Roger, knowing that his business would be imperiled by an official investigation, forces his son to help him hide the body and then bury it in cement. From this moment, the conscience-stricken youth vacillates between loyalty to his father, who is loving but sometimes physically brutal to him, and the desire to carry out his promise to Hamidu.



''La Promesse,'' which the New York Film Festival is showing tonight at 9 at Alice Tully Hall, casts a critical journalistic eye on European multiculturalism and the escalating hostility toward immigrants, especially Africans. What it sees is a Darwinian survival struggle.



As Roger goes to great lengths to cover up his crime, and Igor tries to salve his conscience by doing favors for Assita while keeping the truth from her, the dead man's wife finds herself besieged with lies. To get on Assita's good side, Roger secretly arranges her attempted rape, then breaks in just in time to save her. Later, he fakes a telegram to Assita from Hamidu instructing her to join him in Cologne.



When Assita consults an African spiritualist for news of her husband, the seer confuses her with information that conflicts with Roger's deceptions. Her confusion turns into panic when her baby comes down with a dangerously high fever. Eventually, Igor is forced to make a choice between the father who has encouraged him to lie and steal and assuaging his guilty conscience by continuing to help Assita, of whom he has grown fond. The scene in which he makes that choice is one of the saddest and scariest father-son confrontations ever filmed.



The movie's portrayal of racist xenophobia is all the more disturbing for its matter-of-factness. In one scene, the distraught Assita, her sick baby strapped to her back, waits under a bridge from which two men urinate on her. The portrayal of the immigrants is untainted by sentimentality. These are not plaintively wide-eyed peasants shivering helplessly in the cold, but tough, wily laborers who gamble and even sell their bodies to get ahead. They know exactly what they're up against. And their reactions to Roger's outrageous exploitation are angrily combative.



The integrity of the film, whose directorial team has collaborated on numerous Belgian documentaries, extends to its sad final moments, in which nothing is left neat and tidy. The moral choices we make, the movie suggests, don't result in orderly conclusions. They go on reverberating, setting off complicated chain reactions over which we have no control.