Remember in The Squid and the Whale, when Jeff Daniels’ character Bernard Berkman dismisses A Tale of Two Cities as “minor Dickens?” When he said that, did you take that as a spur to conduct your own quick referendum on Dickens’ work, or more as an indication that the character of Bernard was kind of a jerk? See, my takeaway was the latter, and Roger “Which is correct” Ebert seemed to have gotten the former, which might explain a little of the trouble he had with the film as a whole, maybe.
I think of Bernard, and of how he was kind of a jerk, when I see The Kid With The Bike dismissed or summed up as “minor Dardennes.” I’d love to hear a specific argument over how this is the case, and I don’t think I’m gonna. It’s the best new release I’ve seen so far this year, and my first five-star review form MSN Movies for the year as well. You should totally see it.
i got misty-eyed too– their use of the beethoven was really moving, wasn’t it? everything’s so tense and relentless, and then there are these little oases.
Regarding Jeff Daniels in THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, unquestionably the latter, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not sure what “minor” even means in this context, outside of being a fancy way of saying “I don’t like this one by this person as much as I like other ones by this same person.”
Rhetorical question, I know, but still.
Is there a reason for the not-so-veiled Ebert dis? That seemed pretty gratuitous.
Gratuitous, schmatouitous. He wrote it. I found it. It’s germane to my subject. If that counts as a “dis,” in your book, then…what you will. I didn’t intend the citation as some kind of blanket condemnation, but by the same token it’s also not the first thing he’s ever written, or the last, that comes off the way it comes off.
Well is it germane to your review, or germane to the preamble in which you chastise those that would callously bandy about the “minor” tag? In any case, it seems more than a little churlish to chastise the guy who you’ve sort of defended from the likes of Armond White over the years. But whatever. I did enjoy your review and look forward to the film all the same.
Yes, I defended Ebert from Armond White because Armond attacked him on a purely ad hominem, nasty-ass double-dealing basis that largely involved making snide remarks about Ebert’s illness and then saying “no, that’s not what I meant” whenever he was called on it. I’ve also heard Armond chortle in concordance when another “critic” (who I won’t name here) blustered out loud before a screening that he was wondering why Ebert isn’t dead yet. I genuinely have a lot of respect for Ebert, but, you know, every now and then I might have a difference of methodology/opinion with him. His pedantic side can be a little, well, pedantic at times. Perhaps I overreacted at reading his concurrence concerning “minor Dickens,” but it’s because when I came upon it it actually DID make my jaw drop. But I can see in the context (or lack thereof) above, it looks like a swipe from out of nowhere. Or like I was reaching.
OK, I think I get it now. I wasn’t taking a swipe at you, not by a long shot. In fact, I read this blog regularly and admire your work, so the remark just kind of seemed out of left field. But now I see what you’re getting at with it. As Cobain said, all apologies.
No apologies necessary, it probably wasn’t the most sensitively calibrated observation on my part. What I really wanted to do was a pie chart or Venn diagram where I’d chart the intersections of “minor Dickens” and “minor Dardennes” and instead of doing my homework I ended up cherry-picking a bit of Ebert weirdness. Clearly I need a research intern.
I loved this one too–although I find the notion that the Dardennes are “just repeating themselves” or that this is “too familiar” as infuriating as the idea that Bike is minor…which it isn’t. As if anyone else could have made this movie.
The same thing happened with Lorna’s Silence–which received some pretty unenthusiastic notices for reasons I don’t understand at all.
I saw THE KID WITH A BIKE at AFI Fest last year. It is so freaking good. Walked away marveling at what the Dardennes do, how they make it seem so off the cuff and effortless. There isn’t a wasted moment. As far as I’m concerned, this is a major work from a pair of major filmmakers.
Count me in as another person who thinks “The Kid with a Bike” is major Dardennes. (The following might contain spoilers.)
Another criticism I’ve seen of the film is that it’s implausible and something of a fairy tale. Perhaps this hinges on how you view the Cecile de France character, who I think the Dardennes wisely don’t provide a lot of psychological background for. I suppose, for some people, arbitrary cruelty and malevolence is a lot more credible than seemingly unmotivated goodness. I totally bought it, though, and I think de France’s performance is kind of a miracle; at times bringing to mind Setsuko Hara in “Tokyo Story” in her ability to emit decency and goodwill without being boring or mawkishly saintly.
“I loved this one too–although I find the notion that the Dardennes are “just repeating themselves” or that this is “too familiar” as infuriating as the idea that Bike is minor…which it isn’t. As if anyone else could have made this movie.”
I don’t understand what the second sentence has to do with the first. People who find Kid With a Bike too reminiscent of previous Dardennes films (I am among them, I’m afraid) don’t look at it and think, “Hell, Lasse Hallström could’ve made this!” Obviously it’s very much of a piece with the rest of their oeuvre. That’s kind of the problem. But don’t mind me, I think the widely dismissed Lorna’s Silence is one of their best.
Is Mouchette too much like Au hasard Balthazar? Is Hatari! (or El Dorado, to be even more obvious about it) too much like Rio Bravo? Is The Sun Shines Bright too much like Judge Priest? Oh, and Ozu?
I think I understand where you’re coming from, but for a lot of people part of the joy of following a filmmaker is seeing how much he / she does repeat himself / herself, & the widespread critical assumption that reinvention = good is, for me at least, pretty frustrating.
Why does Cecile de France ALWAYS, ALWAYS have the worst hair ever, in every movie? She changes it from role to role, and still it sucks, always some bad perm or bowl cut or frizz-do from 1987… She’s hot, but her hair is like epically terrible.
Also LOOK AT HER FEET.
(In Durst Voice) See? I told you.
Haven’t seen this, but I loved de France’s heartfelt work in HEREAFTER.
md’a, so you don’t feel quite so isolated, I’ll say that I was VERY big on “Lorna’s Silence” myself, so much so that I wrote about it three times:
http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2008/05/cannes-competit.html
http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/tuesday-morning-foreign-region-dvd-report-le-silence-de-lorna-jean-pierre-and-luc-dardenne-2008
http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2009/07/lorna-and-arta.html
And at least one of those three times I considered what I consider the bugaboo of “artistic growth,” and I’m reasonably sure that in one of those considerations I invoked the relative sameness of the first four Ramones albums, because that’s how I repeat myself.
I have to admit that as a viewer, I’m actually reasonably guilty of going into any Dardennes picture with some kind of preconceived notions…and that the films always manage to shake up those notions somehow. With “Lorna,” the salient difference was in the strange, insinuating and/or overt touches of the mystic. In “Kid” there was a lot of stuff; the tension in the videogame play scene especially. The variety of what they’re able to achieve within their register never ceases to impress me and invariably supercedes whatever concerns I might have about repetitiveness.
For some reason, The Dardennes are the world-class favorites that I can’t quite entirely admire. I liked l’Enfant pretty well, but couldn’t get behind The Son, which sort of turned me off to their movies a little bit. I need to do some re-viewing, I know, and it’s been difficult for me to pinpoint exactly what I object to (especially considering how many people are just over the moon about their movies) but it has something to do with them being slyly deterministic. The films’ realism is always nearly flawless, but it often seems to be in service of a story that is unrealistically rigid. I know that this is often explained as a sort of “parable,” which I don’t object to per se, but in The Son it just felt kind of pat. There are some “give-away” moments that rubbed me the wrong way, almost as though the Dardennes were worried about making certain things clear to their audience (part of it may have been poorly translated subtitles, which get amplified in such a dialogue-light film). Which also implied lack of an inner life to the characters, which again seemed flatly at odds with the meticulous realism of the rest of the movie. All of which isn’t to deny the Dardennes the obvious humanity and tenderness of their work; just that I don’t find it as successful as a lot of other people do.
But maybe this will be the one that turns me around! It sounds very good indeed.
Have they discovered the invention called the tripod yet?
The movie did feel like a “minor” work to me when I saw it at TIFF last year. And this isn’t coming from a Dardennes superfan concerned that the brothers are repeating themselves. I mean, I liked the movie, but my reaction coming out of it was, “Oh, that was nice.” That was about it. I shrugged and moved onto the next screening.
Maybe I need to see it again. The festival experience of crunching in a lot of movies back-to-back sometimes has the effect of draining enthusiasm for any one particular picture.
I’m kind of with Ebert and Zach, except when I’m not. By which I mean, for me, just about every Dardennes film is a minor work. The only one that held me the whole way through and surprised me and seemed to be reaching toward some of the majorness of their more impressive predecessors was THE SON.
Comparisons to Bresson above feel unearned. Yeah, I know they are consciously influenced by the master. But what they’ve done with it is considerably less than, say, what Haneke has.
I seem to recall Ebert rescinding his agreement with the ‘minor Dickens’ judgment in another review or a blog post, but I can’t remember where.
For my money, the last couple of chapters of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ never cease to bowl me over with their almost irresistible emotional power. The encounter between Carton and the French girl at the scaffold is about as close as literature has taken me to (through?) the gates of death. I call that major.
>I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not sure what “minor” even means in this context, outside of being a fancy way of saying “I don’t like this one by this person as much as I like other ones by this same person.”
I guess all aesthetic pronouncements could come down to that, but I’m not sure it’s so terrible to distinguish, between, say, ‘King Lear’ and ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’; or Fur Elise versus the Hammerklavier Sonata. It might simply be a compressed way to express the idea that ‘in a universe of finite time and attention, yours is better spent on X [major] rather than Y [minor].’
Great review Glenn, and I actually really loved “Kid With a Bike,” much more than “L’Enfant,” which I have issues with in terms of where the narrative takes us/my identification with the protagonist. But my one thing I’m still wrestling with in “Kid” is the last 10 minutes and that last sequence. Without giving too much away, I was somewhat confused on the takeaway from that sequence, as well as a bit annoyed by the slight narrative convenience it takes. But I just saw it last night, so I haven’t had enough time to process it. Any thoughts you have would be most appreciated.
The last sequence is about how the law cannot confer love.
@ warren
If you’re referring to my comment, I didn’t compare the Dardennes to Bresson any more than I did to Hawks or Ford or Ozu. They’re all different filmmakers, but in all their cases there’s a compulsion to revisit certain milieus and themes, and a refusal to conform to preconceived ideas of artistic growth. That’s something that doesn’t strike me as being particularly true of Haneke, but since I think he’s pretty much full of shit I’m probably not the best judge in that case.
Well, I don’t know, Peter. The Bresson comparison, whether you meant it that way or not, is a valid one to make on a number of levels. The Dardennes have acknowledged his influence and a number of critics have often made favorable mention of his work and theirs together. And I believe they share certain concerns about the spiritual nature of cinema and the directness and unadorned quality of their images.
I just don’t think they are that great. I keep expecting one of their films to blow me away like the masterworks of Bresson and of the Neorealists that the Dardennes have followed, but I’m usually underwhelmed. The only one that came close was THE SON.
Then again maybe that’s because I’m not in the least bit a humanist. I want something more. Not necessarily darker, but more. And so of all the many international filmmakers who’ve been so heavily influenced by Bresson, Haneke strikes me as the one who’s earned it the most by pushing what he’s borrowed forward in the most interesting ways. You look at his Sight & Sound list of his favorite films at the top are two Bressons plus PSYCHO and SALO. And in his own work he’s stayed true to the best of all of those films.
And if you think Haneke’s so full of shit it wouldn’t be because you’ve only seen FUNNY GAMES (either one) or THE WHITE RIBBON, would it? Because those are his least successful films. And I’d easily say that the FUNNY GAMES films are complete failures – though I love him for having the balls to be so disastrously wrong about the conception of a thing and still make it twice.
The Hanekes to watch and really feel the Bresson influence are some of the early TV work and the first three theatrical features – the so-called emotional glaciation trilogy. My favorites are probably BENNY’S VIDEO, CODE UNKNOWN and THE PIANO TEACHER.
“Boku wa ‘toufu-ya’ dakara toufu shika tsukuranai.”
“I’m a ‘tofu shop’ so I don’t make anything but tofu.”
– Yasujiro Ozu
I pretty much agree with a lot of what you say here–I don’t think Bresson should be called a humanist, and I think the Dardennes could be (it’s far more applicable than the claims of realism or neorealism, which are overstated IMO).
What I get with Bresson that I never, ever get with Haneke is that, despite a certain distance, these are horrible things happening–knights killing each other, wives killing themselves, girls losing their virginity–there’s a palpable sense of pain and loss and you know it really means something to the director. After Glenn posted on The Terrorizers this week I watched it and Mahjong for the first time and that nonnegotiable sense of pain was there too, although it’s still most overwhelming in A Brighter Summer Day. & obviously it’s really non-critical to say, “Well it’s just a feeling and it’s in Bresson and Yang but not in Haneke,” but that’s really what it comes down to for me. In Haneke’s films he never seems to move beyond the realm of just fucking with his protagonists, and there isn’t anything palpably emotionally or spiritually or morally at stake (and very little intellectually too).
I haven’t seen Benny’s Video, and it’s admittedly been awhile since Code Unknown or The Piano Teacher. I should probably revisit. FWIW, I did rewatch Cache recently and liked it even less than I originally did, and I didn’t like it originally.
What’s wrong with tofu?
Oh, Bresson’s definitely not a humanist, but to me the Dardennes definitely are. Though that’s not what makes their work to me less interesting than anyone else’s. Just a more general comment on what I’d prefer. I’d rather see an interesting failure by a not-at-all-humanist influenced by Bresson like Bruno Dumont than a regular slice of humanist life from the brothers Dardenne.
Yeah, maybe have a look at CODE UNKNOWN again, though the available U.S. video editions are kind of crap-tastic.
And don’t watch BENNY’S VIDEO lightly. It will ruin your evening. But only because Haneke makes you feel for the characters and makes you feel what they’ve lost by doing what they do.
It’s too easy a knock on somebody like Haneke who makes intense and unpleasant films to say that he’s doing it for his own delectation or without concern for his characters. I just don’t see that at all. In a way, the single more important Bresson film to him whether he’s ever said this or not is L’ARGENT. The coldness and cruelty and speed of that film…the tenuous and glancing and unexpected connections between people…the responsibility we all have for everyone we’re connected to… it’s as if Haneke’s been remaking it in different ways for much of his career.
My main discomfort with the Bresson comparison lies in the obvious similarity between the endings of “Pickpocket” and “L’Enfant”, though that similarity could be said to be more with Dostoevsky than Bresson. The ending of “L’Enfant”–though it’s still my favorite of the Dardennes’ movies–bothers me both because it feels preconceived and because Renier hits his bottom as much from physical as moral exhaustion. What saves it is that, even though he’s been redeemed, his situation is still so far from clear and his prospects so far from rosy that we can’t say for sure that he’s been saved.
Robin Wood mentions this aspect in this terrific essay:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_44/ai_n18764241/?tag=content;col1
Thom Andersen has a good one, too:
http://www.filmlinc.com/film-comment/article/lornas-silence-review
Anyway, I think the humanist argument is close to a non-starter as a link between the brothers and Bresson. In terms of approach, the neorealists are much closer. Bresson is more appropriate in terms of characters wishing for, and sometimes finding, some bit of grace in the worst possible circumstances, and in the intense localized focus on physical tasks such as Rosetta pulling her boots from the drain-pipe every day. These events are so much like ritual and their significance is so completely extra-verbal that they remind me of William Carlos Williams’ line “No ideas but in things”. Even an outburst of activity like the long scooter chase near the end of “L’Enfant”–which I think is one of the great action scenes in the history of the medium–has the same irreducible quality Williams was talking about: you just can’t put into words what that chase means without diminishing it. (It also tickles me when critics opine that the title of “L’Enfant” just “might” refer to Renier rather than the actual baby; the same people probably wonder whether the title of “Chinatown” refers to something more than the neighborhood where Evelyn Mulwray’s butler lives.)
Anyway, I can’t wait to see “Kid”, though it’s unclear that it’s even gonna open in SF. Which’d be a pisser, for sure.
Yeah, nobody here is trying to say Bresson’s a humanist. Precisely the ways in which he isn’t even when he’s focusing on the mundane activities and earthly suffering of his models is part of what makes his films endlessly interesting to me.
The work portrayed in Bresson’s films is always what it is plus, like you say, something else ineffable. Except I don’t usually feel that something else in the Dardennes’ films. In THE SON it’s there in the carpentry scenes mostly because of the huge mysterious tension (and then, once you know the secret, the great dramatic irony) of what Olivier suspects/knows about his student Francis.
I guess I also feel like I’ve seen more compelling neo-Neorealism too, in something like, say, CHOP SHOP.
I really liked “The Kid with a Bike,” I think it’s one of their best. I don’t think you can knock a filmmaker, or any artist, for using the same approach to their work when they’re exploring new ground within those parameters, and that’s what the Dardennes have often done with their later realist films. It helps that they’re working with rich, morally complex material, stories that are really suited by their style.
Warren, what is humanism to you? I mean, if you had to define it, what would you say? Not trying to be argumentative, I’m genuinely curious. You wouldn’t say MOUCHETTE is a humanist work?
I’d say MOUCHETTE has a deep humanity to it. But I wouldn’t say it’s humanism. I suppose those who love Bresson are forever groping after the right kind of language to describe the effects of his films: Transcendental Style, etc. It’s easier to say what his films aren’t then what they are. Whereas I suppose what I’m talking about with the Dardennes vis-a-vis other filmmakers whose work I prefer like Bresson, Haneke and even sometimes Ramin Bahrani is that, I don’t know, like that line from INTO THE WOODS “they’re not good, they’re not bad, they’re just nice” except substitute “humanist” and you get what I mean.
The Dardennes seem deeply interested in the suffering of ordinary people the same way the great Neorealists were, but I mostly don’t see anything else beyond that. There’s usually no mystery or transcendence or anything beyond what we see. There’s no particular interest in capturing a larger sense of the time and place like most older Neorealists. There’s not a particularly great sense of storytelling, in spite of the many films of theirs that supposedly have great twists (another comparison springs to mind: watch REVANCHE with LORNA’S SILENCE). And there’s no ambition to the kind of formalism that I love in Bresson. I’m almost always left wanting something more.
I haven’t read A TALE OF TWO CITIES in more than thirty years. But I thinks its reasonable to say that major Dickens is THE PICKWICK PAPERS, OLIVER TWIST, DAVID COPPERFIELD, HARD TIMES, LITTLE DORRITT, BLEAK HOUSE and GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
I’m very much looking forward to KID WITH A BIKE, but Peter, I have to admit, I must read different critics than you if you think the “widespread critical assumption” is “good=reinvention”; my impression is it’s the opposite tack. And I think there should be room for both directors who are constantly trying to challenge themselves and directors who, like the Dardennes, are playing new variations on the same theme.
Forgive me if I’m coming off a tad defensive on the subject; I’m currently reading a study on Louis Malle, one of my favorite all-time filmmakers, and coming across reviews that call him a dilettante, which I think is outrageous.
I think there should be too, and if it came across that I was saying that only directors like Ford & Ozu & the Dardennes matter then I really misrepresented my own position–the only point I was trying to make, and I think it’s essentially the same one you are making here, was that a director shouldn’t be faulted for returning to familiar territory, or even making the same movie over and over, no more than a director should be faulted for trying new things. Both are valid; I generally prefer and admire the former approach, but that doesn’t mean it’s “better,” or that it’s more valid. Again, if I didn’t express that, then I misspoke (miswrote?). My bad.
Maybe we do read different critics; I dunno. To use two more examples: Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica and Garrel’s Un ete brulant, two great, great recent films, received some pretty withering notices in some corners for repeating the director’s basic thematic and aesthetic conceits. In both cases I think that’s somewhat true, although more in the case of the latter than the former, and in both cases that’s a huge part of what I responded to in them and admired. In the case of Un ete brulant, I’ve come across VERY few reviews that don’t consist completely of this-is-rehashed-senile-crap-we’ve-seen-before-isms, and I mean, I think it’s an amazing movie, so when I talk about The Kid with a Bike I’m probably guilty of talking about other movies too.
Apologies for the length.
I kind of had both reactions when I saw it back in October. For much of the movie it felt like Dardennes-light. We haven’t just seen that world before in Dardenne movies, we’ve seen it before in a lot of other movies. But about the last third, and particularly the last scene of the film I was genuinely moved, and a lot of narrative choices sort of locked into place for me in retrospect. I’m still not feeling it as one of their best works, but it is an undeniably strong work, and one I hope to revisit soon.
Usually I just sit on the sidelines and watch these discussions unfold, but I have some information on the last 10 minutes of The Kid With A Bike – which I too had small issues with. Spoilers abound ahead.
A few days ago I had the privilege of almost 45 minutes with Luc Dardenne, as part of a roundtable at which I was one of only two journalists. After the usual questions about story, tone and the working with the children, I brought up the ending. Other than the fact that having something happen to Cyril when you expect something to happen seems movie storytelling rather than naturalistic storytelling, the tidy wrapping up of the shopkeeper story undermined what I felt was one of the strongest moments in the film: Cyril’s reaction to being told he wasn’t forgiven by the shopkeeper’s son. It is the first time a childish action has an adult consequence and – I’d imagined – would niggle and haunt Cyril for years – the sour aftertaste of his short criminal life. This is all undermined by turning the shopkeeper’s son into a convenient villain. Mr Dardenne had two answers: He thought the audience would leave the cinema thinking the shopkeeper’s son would be planning revenge – so wanted to nip that worry in the bud, and he wanted the film to provide another example of a bad father figure. The thought of revenge hadn’t entered my head, not for a film set so solidly in the real world, and the father figure angle doesn’t work well either; the shopkeeper is eager to break the law, but only to protect his son, a stark contrast to Cyril’s Father eagerly discarding his law breaking son. But I didn’t push the point, I was talking to Luc Dardenne after all.
Plotting revenge would seem unrealistic, but addressing how the shopkeeper’s son would carry this incident with him and how the film dramatized that seemed very reasonable to me.
‘Kid’ doesn’t open in my area until May, but I (always) find this discussion of the Dardennes interesting. It seems that most people always bring up their influences, as if that is the major reason people bother watching/praising/financing their movies. Bresson and De Sica are obvious, intentional influences, especially on ROSETTA (and you could even throw in Rossellini’s GERMANY YEAR ZERO, in my opinion). I think the humanist part comes from the viewer (as in, if the viewer isn’t one, the movie probably ain’t). Aside from the thematic material, I think their continual use of at-the-time unknown youth for many of their lead roles tends to be another checkmark on these generalizations.
But when comparing any of their films to Bresson or Neorealism or whatever, it seems like the debate about whether they are worthy champions of some sort of nebulous aesthetic torch hardly ever descends into questioning whether they are simply grave pastiche copycats. So, to me, that bodes well for them, if that makes any sense.
Definitely not lesser Dardennes. It is actually my favourite Dardenne to date.
Humanistically speaking, I thought Ebert’s review of THE SON was one of his most touching pieces. And the film made his Best of Decade list.
FWIW, I’m a longtime admiring reader of Roger AND Glenn.
I saw KID this morning and was pretty blown away, about as far from “minor Dardennes” as I can imagine (I have to admit, it won me with “You can hold me, but just not so tight,” and never lost me from that point on). THE SON has always been my favorite of theirs, and KID would be a particularly fine companion piece.
And last night I saw ANATOMY OF A MURDER on the big screen. I’d only seen it once before, on VHS, and didn’t see what the big deal was, but this time I was hugely impressed. And for once with the New Beverly, they managed to keep it in focus pretty much the whole time. Yay, New Beverly!
The first year I lived in the L.A. area, I found a revival house in Pasadena called the State Theater. For a few brief weeks I was able to enjoy excellent 35mm prints of such classics as ANATOMY OF A MURDER, KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS, THE HORSE’S MOUTH, THE OLD DARK HOUSE and LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME – and then the place went under. It was an older theater, but roomy and comfy enough, with a large screen. I always appreciated the New Beverly, but as a venue it paled in comparison.