A Terrible Secret.(filmmaker Jean-Pierre Dardenne)(Interview)

Jean-Pierre Dardenne, the elder brother of the successful Belgian filmmaking team, is in an excitable mood. He's on the phone, but his tone is ample and enthusiastic; you can almost see his hands waving over a cigarette and a Jupiler, the local beer from Liege, where he and his brother Luc hail from. He speaks French through a translator, and often punctuates his thoughts with an emphatic "Oui, voila!" or just "Voila!" As in: "Rossellini, Pasolini, Fassbinder--these are the directors we watch again and again, oui, voila!"

Today, though, he's most excited to be talking about the brothers' new work, "The Son," the third in a loose trilogy of social-realist films that take place in the economically depressed mining town of Seraing, where the brothers grew up, 10 minutes outside Liege. It's the story of Olivier, a lonely, reticent man with thick glasses (played by the talented but emphatically unglamorous Olivier Gourmet), who teaches carpentry to troubled teens in a reform school. His ex-wife is remarried by now and pregnant. Soon we learn that their small son was killed five years earlier--and that the murderer, Francis (Morgan Marinne, in his first acting role), now 16, is one of Olivier's charges at the school. Francis is meek, barely literate, from a broken home and looking for parental figures. He's quietly deferential to the burly, knowing Olivier--all the teens are--but he doesn't know that the carpenter knows who he is, and what horrible act he's committed.

The Biblical allusions are plenty. But the Dardennes, lapsed Roman Catholics both, got the idea for the script from the well-publicized 1994 murder of toddler Jamie Bulger in England by two adolescents. They were also moved by Gourmet himself, who appeared in two of their earlier films. "We promised ourselves to put Olivier at the center of a film," says Jean-Pierre, 51, three years older than Luc. "We were really inspired by his mysterious and enigmatic personality. Voila." So were the judges at Cannes, who awarded Gourmet the best-actor award at the festival last year for his role. This year "The Son" will be Belgium's entry for the best foreign-film Oscar.

The entire movie is shot with a handheld camera--but without any of the other pretensions of the Dogma 95 manifesto. There's no music and little dialogue. Yet the story unfolds with perfect pacing, slowly, warily, building to a tension that becomes almost ...