Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80851 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-03-12
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English, Italian
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 90 minutes

Amazon.com
La Promesse draws on the considerable documentary acumen of its directors, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (Rosetta), to prove a revelation in narrative filmmaking. Shot on the outskirts of an industrial city in Belgium, the film follows Igor (Jérémie Rénier), the 15-year-old son of a single parent named Roger (Olivier Gourmet) who rents squalid apartments to recently arrived immigrants, many of them illegal. As Igor struggles to hold down odd jobs while assisting his father in crooked dealings, the Dardenne brothers plunge the audience into the thick of difficult issues--immigration, cultural and racial bias, bureaucratic injustices--without overtly politicizing or diminishing any of their characters. When Igor promises to help a young African woman, he finds he must choose between loyalty to his father and his own conscience. The beauty is in how the Dardenne brothers seem to share in the viewer's curiosity about the film's outcome, having captured a world so charged yet unadorned you feel the surprise of each new scene alongside the directors. An extraordinary film that bears repeated viewings. --Fionn Meade

Customer Reviews

Best of 1998
This is not a warm fuzzy picture by any means, but it is film for people who love people and appreciate the higher instincts of mankind that transcend nationality, race, gender, and age. Does one follow instinctual bonds to family, or honor and committment to a worthy promise.

I absolutely loved this film...and so did my Parisian friends to whom I recommended it.

Filial anguish
A predecessor to "Dirty Pretty Things" Dirty Pretty Things, the Dardennes brothers snare the viewer into the sordid world of illegal immigration in Belgium. The protagonist Igor (Jeremie Renier) is used by his amoral father Roger (Olivier Gourmet) to assist in the exploitation of undocumented workers. The movie follows the evolution of Igor's unquestioning love for his brutal father when a workplace accident forces the teenager to make a promise that requires him to develop a conscience. The father's love for Igor and the intimate depiction of the father-son relationship is what makes Igor's moral dilemma so poignant and agonizing. Young Renier's breakout performance in this haunting, documentary style movie is simply not to be missed.

The camera simply watches . . .
Documentary filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne bring a particularly convincing sense of real life captured on film with this their first fiction film. The hand-held camera and location settings and the abrupt edits that propel the story forward, together with a very unromanticized subject, make this fictional world completely believable as a slice of life lived by men and women on the fringes of law-abiding society. With young Igor (Jérémie Rénier), a teenager older than his years, at the center of the story, we learn of illegal aliens and those who profit by providing them with shelter and work in the gray urban landscape of a northern European city.

Rénier's performance is remarkable, as is that of his unpleasant father played by Olivier Gourmet. The camera simply watches them without comment, functioning in an amoral universe, until a fatal accident brings about a sudden change of heart for the young Igor and a commitment, against all odds, to make right something that has gone horribly wrong. The movie avoids sentimentality and takes you relentlessly to an end that leaves us, the characters walking away, their dilemma unresolved. An excellent film for anyone who likes thoughtful renderings of real life concerns. See also the Dardenne's more recent film, "L'Enfant," also starring Renier.