Another slice of naturalism from the Belgian brothers Dardenne, Jean-Pierre and Luc, who previously carved out The Promise and Rosetta. This one revolves around a vocational training facility, and more particularly around a stolid carpenter in coke-bottle glasses and six-inch leather girdle for back support. The camera crowds in as close as it can get, but the actors make no accommodation for it, so that it's often looking at the back of the balding head of our protagonist, peering over the dandruff-like sprinkle of sawdust on his shoulders, picking up practical details of the trade along with the students. Perhaps more agitated than necessary, it changes focus, it jiggles, it jockeys for a better angle. There is no music, ever, unless you count the ambient sawing and hammering as some kind of modernist percussion piece. We can tell something is up with the protagonist: suspicious behavior, strange looks, an unnatural interest in a newly enrolled sandy-haired teenager, yet an almost panicky avoidance of direct contact with him. What we the viewers find out long before the boy does, but not before we can draw a wrong conclusion or two, is that this is the boy, fresh from the reformatory, who killed the protagonist's son and repercussively destroyed his marriage. It is a powerful and suspenseful situation, so much so that it needs no trumped-up theatrics to sell itself. The undemonstrative actors (Olivier Gourmet, Morgan Marinne) do not blunt the power, nor does the offhand treatment blunt the suspense: not, at any rate, for a viewer who can find his way to The End without constant cues as to what he ought to be thinking and feeling. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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