A
man marries a woman, they aren’t too well off, but that’s not important to the
story, and they have a baby, a boy, who they love, a lot. One night, the boy,
the couples son, he gets killed, he was in their families car and it gets
broken into and he gets killed, it’s a tragedy, terrible, wouldn’t even wish
this onto ones enemies, but life has to go on, right? The happily married
couple, after the murder of their son, splits up, gets divorced, are no longer
together, i.e. are no longer legally married, though he still misses her, or
not exactly “her,” but his wife, and his son at that, and the life he had,
which he longer has. And the man, who sees his ex-wife regularly, has found out
that she is now with a new guy and pregnant again, with a new child that wont
be his. Let’s say that the man X is a carpenter, you know the blue denim
overall type, and at his job, one day he sees this sixteen-year-old kid, let’s
call him Y, come in looking for a job, and he recognizes the boy from the trial
for his sons murder. This boy Y at first gets a job in the wielding department
of the factory, but then, for some complex reason the man X wants for some
reason be closer to this “messed up” kid, well after what he’s done, he has to
be messed up – right? So this blonde-haired boy who has just got out of a
five-year prison term, and you can tell he’s probably living in a half-way
house with a social-worker or a shitty one-room apartment with his mattress on
the floor and stuff, and he’s so happy and feels lucky to have this job, and
but like starts to appreciate X’s guidance and helpfulness, as this kid never
knew his own father and apparently his mom’s boyfriend doesn’t allow him to see
her, i.e. the boys mom. And X does help him out, not exactly because he wants
to, but he’s caught in a few instances where he just kind-of has to help, like he’s asked where a certain street is
and, really, if you know, how can you not direct him to the right street, or
else you would be a total dick. And Y is impressed with X’s ability to
precisely measure objects and distances, to the fucking centimeter, and they
play around with this, the distance between Y and a car, the length of a piece
of wood etc. Let’s return back to X and describe him more faithfully: X is a
big man, he does sit-ups on his floor regularly, looks to be around 5’10 and
weighs around 210 pounds, balding with short brown hair, thick lenses in his
steel-rimmed glasses, with a constant pissed off look on his face, as if he’s
keeping at bay an overwhelming anger (with the loss of the son, this is
understandable), and when ever X is around Y this seems to be amplified. While
Y is aloof, silent, also more introspective, but unlike X the reasons for Y
w/r/t the introspection it seems like its more like that of a hurt puppy or
that of a child who accidentally touched a cooking element, he’s gone through
too much and is now weary, and its painful to hear Y describes playing foosball
when he was locked up as a way “to forget my problems,” because its a perfectly
child-like thing to do, but in a very un-childlike mise en scène. So X and Y work more and more together, and on one
day they go on a suspiciously long drive to a lumber yard (so far they’ve only
been working in the carpentering workshop), and on this drive X asks Y about
the murder, and Y asks X if he would consider taking him in and being his
guardian. Silence. They keep driving. They are now in the lumberyard, where
everything seems to reach a climax w/r/t to their interpersonal relationship.
As at the lumberyard, this expansive industrial space, with its steel walls and
ceiling, full of stacks of lumber, stacked on one another, full of hiding
spaces and shadows: X tells Y that he’s the father of the boy that he killed.
An unbalanced moment, for Y as he has to both (a) think about all of the
experiences he had with X and mentally revisit these experience – some of them
have been pretty scary, e.g. X knocking him off a ladder, X throwing down large
planks of wood at him – to see how this might change his perception of them and
(b) run, get away from this deranged figure, um, because who would actually
spend all of this time to get close to the person who killed your son, right,
and what does he, X, want to do to him, anyways? After an extensive chase,
which seems like its right out of French Connection II or
something, the two of them are now outside on the dirt, X catches up with Y, is
on top of him, choking him, X has his hands around his throat, Y isn’t
breathing right, X’s grip is getting tighter, there is the look of a murderer
in his eyes, shit, is he going to do it? Kill Y, the person who killed his son,
who he’s been working with for these last few days, and who he now kind-of
likes, what good would it actually do? There is no way X’s son is coming back,
and what about, when X was chasing Y, and tells him that he doesn’t want to
hurt him, and now he’s doing just that.
And then X stops, and throws his
hands, his fists, on the ground.
They both sit up, beside each
other, for a while, and breathe heavily, and then the man, X, walks away. He’s
now back at his car, dirty, after all the rolling around in dirt, and he’s
putting the last few pieces of lumber in his vehicle, and then the boy, Y, is
there and after a brief moment of hesitation, the boy starts to help.
Q: (A) Is the man, X, a good father?
*****
For the answer to this question, and more concerning Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's film Le fils come to hear Adam Nayman discuss it at the next talk in the series What We Talk About at the Drake Underground later on this month.
4 comments:
This is well above average.
CR, Thanks man.
Hi David,
Great post. It is written in a different style than you normally write in. Must be a very intense movie.
Sleepless3
Sleepless, Yeah, I was inspired by a David Foster Wallace short story called Octet, and this time I used the review more like a writing exercise. I'm glad you liked it, and happy to hear there weren't grammar mistakes :P
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