La Promesse (The Promise) is a French film from about 1996, I believe, directed by the same guys who directed Rosetta, a film about a teenage girl and the misery of her life, which seems directly tied to her lower-class economic status. Similar elements are to be found in this earlier film as well, except this time the protagonist is a teenage boy, and he, and his father, aren’t the exploited lower-class, but the exploiters of that class.

The kid’s father employs illegal immigrants, housing them in a run-down apartment building, and making them work on a few of his properties. The movie doesn’t try to make this guy out into a sympathetic character --- it is clear that he’s exploiting these immigrants, and cares nothing for them as human beings. He rips them off on every opportunity -- he’ll charge them for virtually everything under the sun. He even sets up a scenario where a few of the immigrants are captured by police -- he fools them into believing they are being taken to a better working arrangement, and squeezes a few bucks out of them for transportation costs, before the immigrants discover, the hard way, what’s really going on.

The kid works with his father. He’s only 15, but doesn’t go to school. As the film begins, he’s working, as well, as a welder’s apprentice, but is constantly called up by his dad, ordering him to return home for whatever things that he wants him to do. Naturally, the kid listens to his father -- what young teenager wouldn’t? -- even though this consistent abandoning of this apprenticeship demands that he loses it, which he does, not too much later in the film.

Something tragic happens. An African immigrant falls to his death from a scaffold -- actually, he’s not quite dead when the kid finds him. The immigrant has a wife and kid, and he asks the kid to promise him to take care of them.

This promise isn’t as easy as it sounds, because taking care of people naturally would include a level of truth and confidence, not easy to come by when the kid is getting his life lessons from a guy who hurts and exploits people. What happens when the father discovers the kid and the immigrant’s body is just nasty. The kid wants to take the guy to the hospital - the man, apparently, isn’t quite dead yet -- but the father immediately covers up the scene of the accident, covering the body with junk, leading to the ghastly moment when the immigrant’s wife, coming home from the market, practically trips over the junk hiding the body, without even knowing that her own husband is dying underneath.

After this scene, the father makes the kid help him with disposing of the body in a much more convenient place in the basement. The father has absolutely no intention of telling the truth about what happened -- it’s bad enough that he uses illegal immigrants, but one got killed at his property, and the father is only worried about his own skin, nobody else’s -- and, in fact, makes the wife believe that the husband ran away due to gambling debts (earlier, we have already seen that, in fact, the husband does have an issue with gambling, so the wife, at first, anyway, buys this).

The kid is conflicted. He senses that this whole situation is not quite right, but at the same time, he’s the child of the father -- a young person, for the most part, doesn’t not want to anger his or her parents; the children want the approval, or the acceptance of their parents. Even though the father in this movie is one of the worst sorts of role models, he’s still the father - and a kid as young as the one in this movie will find it hard to break free from the psychological grip the father has over him. Of course, if he does break free, he will also be able to give himself some room to mature and become a true individual, instead of someone who always does what he is told.

One thing this movie does is tell us something that we hear about in the news sometimes, but may not know much about. I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of such practices, but this film definitely shows you the mentality of people who are willing to play a part in this illegal situations. The immigrants obviously just want to find a better place to live, something better than the misery and poverty they’ve had back in their home countries --- but they don’t realize that sometimes the hype exceeds the reality, and that there are many people in the wonderful West who are willing to cheat and take advantage of anyone, especially foreigners. The exploiters, like the father, justify their actions, because of either conscious, or unconscious, racism -- they see the immigrants as “different”, so they don’t feel the need to treat them like “ordinary” folk. I have a feeling that the father wouldn’t try to cheat everyday people, white French people, like himself nearly as strongly as he would foreigners. The father also seems to view these people with contempt in many ways as well -- he tells the kid that what happened to the immigrant was an accident, and that none of this would not have happened otherwise. He seems to be saying this as if it were the immigrant’s fault, regardless of the fact that he’s not the one with the morality and ethical problem.

The movie is pretty flat, in terms of its direction. There are no fancy camera shots or score music, and there’s no melodrama. The camera records everything coldly -- even the death of the immigrant is handled, visually, without any emotion or force. Everything just happens, in front of our eyes, very casually. Anyone who wants big emotional moments or heavy dramatics will probably be bored to death of this film, or will, at the very least, feel that there could be something more, especially when it comes to the last few shots, which seem to be somewhat inconclusive. Nevertheless, La Promesse contains many amazing sequences that reveal to us a major social problem in a frank, un-sensationalistic way, seen through the eyes of a child who is forced to grow up, in more ways than one.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day