#robin pront

Movie-log 

067. The silencing

When I finished Robin Pront’s The Ardennes, I knew I needed to sleep on it. I simply felt too many conflicting emotions. Did I like the film and its bizarre genre pastiches? Its intense Clint Eastwood/Coen Brothers color-grading that submerged the whole film in a sea of wintry grays and dark blues? Its nihilistic, David Fincher third act plot twists where nobody wins and everyone loses? A subtle undercurrent of David Lynch surrealism—a pair of roving ostriches in the last twenty minutes seem to have stumbled from the set of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009). The Ardennes wasn’t so much an original film as a mishmash of ideas from other, more established filmmakers. So again, I asked myself: did I like it?

Having had a night to think it over, I’ve come to the conclusion that, yes, I do like The Ardennes. All cinema is derivative: directors shamelessly steal and borrow from their predecessors and contemporaries in a ceaseless creative dialectic. Some directors, like Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, might wear their influences on their sleeves. But as long as they create something compelling and meaningful we allow it. And The Ardennes was certainly both. It tells the story of two Flemish criminals, brothers Dave (Jeroen Perceval) and Kenny (Kevin Janssens). The film begins with a robbery gone wrong with Dave escaping and Kenny getting sentenced to seven years in prison. After serving four, Kenny gets released to find that things have changed. For one, both his girlfriend Sylvie (Veerle Baetens) and Dave have cleaned up their respective addictions through 12-step programs. Dave has a respectable job working in a car wash, Sylvie is taking masseuse classes so she doesn’t have to work in a strip club anymore. Here’s what Kenny knows: Dave, Sylvie, and the world has moved on without him. Here’s what Kenny doesn’t know: in the meantime, Dave and Sylvie have fallen in love, moved in together, and are pregnant.

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