Warning: this review is lousy with spoilers.
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Taken as a whole, the movies offer a damning critique of global capitalism as it works its way down to the street and poisons the most intimate human encounters. But there’s also a powerful countertheme at work, because all five movies deal with parenthood in one way or another. Of course, giving life to another person is a kind of transaction too, but as many parents will tell you, it can profoundly alter the way you see the world, skewing your personal calculus in favor of someone else in a way even love and marriage might not. For some people raising a child is their most dramatic experience in selflessness, and the sacrifices they make for their kids ennoble them in ways they never expected. The clash between two opposing impulses—greed and generosity—elevates the Dardennes’ best movies above simple political cant.
La Promesse establishes this tension with considerable complexity right off the bat, because there are really two father figures in the story (played by two actors who turn up again and again in the later movies). Roger (played by the stout, potato-faced Olivier Gourmet) does a nice business milking immigrants who’ve been smuggled into Belgium to work the factories: he forges their work permits, warehouses them in a filthy apartment building, and hits them up for all manner of exorbitant surcharges as he makes his rounds, accompanied by his teenage son, Igor (15-year-old Jeremie Renier). When police raid the building one of the tenants plunges from a scaffold to the ground, and before he dies he makes Igor promise to care for his wife and infant son, who’ve just come from Burkina Faso to join him.
Lorna certainly takes a businesslike view of her domestic arrangement with Claudy: as the sole wage earner, she sleeps alone in the bedroom of their apartment while he crashes on the living room floor, and their money is kept so separate that even a box of snack crackers she picks up for him must be paid back to the dime. But Lorna’s feelings toward Claudy begin to change when he decides he’s going to kick his heroin habit and she watches him suffer through an agonizing withdrawal. (Spoilers follow, so stop reading here if that’s a problem.) In the movie’s most far-fetched scene, Lorna tries to distract the recovering Claudy from an impending rendezvous with his dealer by offering him her body, which he eagerly accepts. But her motives aren’t sexual: Claudy’s physical ordeal has triggered in Lorna a mothering instinct so powerful that she sacrifices herself physically to protect him.
