La Promesse

Pop quiz: You're a teenager in a Belgian suburb whose father runs an illegal immigrant labor network. Naturally, your pop's sketchy sense of ethics has rubbed off on you, and at fifteen you're already an accomplished liar and thief. Nevertheless, when one of the immigrant workers falls from a scaffold on a construction site and is badly injured, you rush to his aid...until your father, fearing an investigation, intervenes, opting instead to deliberately let the man die. Before he breathes his last, however, the victim manages to extract from you a promise: to take care of his wife and infant child, who will be left without any means of support in an unfamiliar country. For reasons that you don't fully understand, you feel an overpowering sense of obligation to this family--and yet to help them is to destroy your dad, whom you love dearly. What do you do? What do you do? This stark narrative culminates in one of the most harrowing familial confrontations imaginable--all the more remarkable because, for once, there isn't a handgun in sight. Belgian directing brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne create tension the old-fashioned way: not with rote equations like train + helicopter + plastic explosives = BOOM!, but with volatile human emotions and contrary wills. Highly recommended. (M. D'Angelo)