Le jeune Ahmed
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (2019)
Ahmed is young to attempt Islamism-inspired acts of violence – only thirteen. The youngest of three children, living with his single mother and siblings in the Dardennes’ usual locale of small-town Wallonia, he’s very recently radicalised. In an early scene, his exasperated mother, when he brands her a drunk because she likes a glass of wine, points out that Ahmed’s main interest a month ago was video games. He’s been inspired to transform his life by the combination of an older cousin, gone abroad to become a jihadi fighter, and ‘that jerk of an imam’ (Ahmed’s mother’s phrase) at the local mosque. When the boy tries and fails to stab a female teacher whom the imam considers a dangerous apostate, Ahmed is placed in a custodial rehabilitation centre for young people. His mother visits him there. By now, she’s less exasperated than deeply distressed. She tells her son she wishes he could be the way he used to be.
The difficulty of imagining the title character’s supposedly ‘normal’ past is a persisting problem in Young Ahmed. Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi) is so closed off he sometimes gives the impression of being on the autistic spectrum rather than in the grip of monomania, though nothing is said by his family or any other character to substantiate that impression. Ahmed is bespectacled, humourless, not overweight but somehow dumpy; his movement is ungainly, occasionally seems slightly effeminate. His brother Rachid (Amine Hamidou) and sister Yasmine (Cyra Lassman) are both conventionally better-looking. Rachid, unlike Ahmed, has his own friends and is ready to skive off prayers to play sport until the imam, Youssouf (Othman Mouen), puts him right. Yasmine fights with Ahmed when he deplores her revealing clothes. All in all, he seems the sort of kid unlikely to be popular with his contemporaries – the sort, perhaps, who fastens on an extraordinary idée fixe as a mark of distinction and a means of distancing himself from peer pressure. But this is only conjecture (like plenty more below) – necessarily so, since the writer-directors are intent on describing behaviour rather than exploring psychology.
Psychology as a profession – represented by Ahmed’s psychologist at the rehab centre (Eva Zingaro-Meyer) – is made almost laughable. The Dardennes don’t show any of her sessions with Ahmed as such but there’s a crucial conversation between them in the centre’s grounds. Ahmed’s mother (Claire Bodson) has urged him to meet with Inès (Myriem Akheddiou), the teacher he tried to attack and succeeded in traumatising (even though she isn’t physically injured). Ahmed refuses but then changes his mind and asks the psychologist if she’ll approve the meeting. She’s sceptical until he says it might help Inès, rather than him. The psychologist sees this as real empathetic progress – ‘For the first time, you’ve put yourself in someone else’s shoes’. The meeting goes ahead, or nearly does so: Inès breaks down as soon as she sees Ahmed and is escorted from the interview room in tears. Just as well, since Ahmed had fashioned an improvised weapon with which to make a second attempt on her life, and smuggled it into the room. The psychologist’s decision is all the more careless given that Ahmed actually told her that Inès had said the meeting might help her. He didn’t even claim the idea as his own.
We first see Ahmed and Inès together in an after-school algebra class, which the boy is anxious to leave in order to get to the mosque. Ahmed’s mother is full of praise for the conscientious teacher, who, she says, has also helped her son’s dyslexia; Inès incurs the wrath of Youssouf by planning to teach Arabic to Muslim children in this French-speaking community in the form of Koranic verses put to music. In the imam’s view, that would be a sacrilegious dilution and virtual secularisation of the holy text. Yet when Ahmed bungles his attack and tells the imam what’s happened, Youssouf is alarmed. He didn’t mean that Inès should be killed (the holy war to come, he says, will take care of that). Ahmed’s actions will reflect badly on the mosque so must be reported to the police – Youssouf reassures Ahmed he won’t be put in detention for long. The Dardennes may well mean this to illustrate the exploitation of Muslim youth by religious authority figures but don’t explain why, in view of the imam’s reaction, Ahmed continues to see the killing of Inès as unfinished business.
Anticipating he’ll get the job done in the interview room, Ahmed writes his mother a note, asking her forgiveness then telling her that, once she thinks about it, she should realise what he’s done is right. He passes the note to a member of centre staff, explaining that it contains details of the food he’d like his mother to bring on her next visit. When the interview is aborted, Ahmed calmly explains that he’s changed his mind, asks for and gets the note back Like Cyril, the young protagonist of The Kid with a Bike (2011), Ahmed is single-minded. Unlike Cyril, he’s a thoroughly unsympathetic character.
Especially because he’s a child, that intensifies your desire to understand, if not excuse, his actions. It’s naturally tempting to wonder if he’s in search of a father figure. Whether his own father has died or gone AWOL isn’t clear but Ahmed brands him a failure: his mother’s alcohol consumption and the fact that neither she nor Yasmine wears the hijab is proof of that, according to Ahmed. First Youssouf, then, more interestingly, the boy’s rehab centre caseworker are somewhat paternal presences in his life. You sense that, even though he’s only pretending to be a reformed character, Ahmed has a degree of respect for his caseworker (Olivier Bonnaud). Still, he and the system he’s part of must be opposed. For Ahmed, the Prophet is the only reliable role model.
Most of what Ahmed says is dogmatic and little of the rest is honest. A rare exception to this occurs in the same conversation in which his mother tearfully regrets the change in her son. Youngsters in the rehab centre have the opportunity to spend time, under their caseworker’s supervision, on a nearby farm. After his first visit, Ahmed tells his mother he doesn’t want to return because the people there are ‘too nice’. His baffled mother asks if he’d rather they were ‘nasty’ and Ahmed says he would. (You know where you are when the enemy conforms to expectations.) He returns to the farm, nevertheless. The farmer’s adolescent daughter, Louise (Victoria Bluck), shows him how to milk cows, and so on, and their early interactions are among the best bits in the film. Ahmed’s physically rigid resistance to Louise’s tentative friendliness, along with his fear of touching the farm animals, is painful to see.
The Dardennes push this relationship improbably far, though, using it as the means of bringing their short (82-minute) film to its climax and conclusion. While Louise’s affable curiosity about Ahmed is credible, her attempts to seduce him aren’t – nor is his capitulation. After they’ve kissed, Ahmed tells Louise this would have been wrong even if she were Muslim but, since she’s not, is an unforgivable sin – unless she’s prepared to convert. She tells him to get lost. On the way back from the farm, Ahmed leaps out of his caseworker’s car, runs off and catches a bus into town, where he makes his way to Inès’s apartment block. He can’t get into the place at ground level so clambers up the building, holding a jagged piece of something he breaks off from the exterior of the block.
When Ahmed falls from a considerable height, it’s a shock – not least because (as you now realise) you’ve kept seeing him as a potential harm-doer rather than a potential injured party – whatever the Dardennes may have intended. For this viewer, that feeling continued to the last. Even lying on his back and disabled, Ahmed still appears to be clutching his sharp object. When Inès emerges from the building and bends down to him, you hold your breath. She says she’ll phone for an ambulance, moves away then turns back towards him as Ahmed calls her name; you hold your breath once more. He tells her he’s sorry and she moves off again. That’s the end of the film. Although you feel relieved for the teacher, it’s an unconvincing finale – not least in Inès’s compassion for the injured boy, which is too considered. It would be better if she seemed more in shock, to be acting automatically.
Although Young Ahmed won the Dardennes the Best Director prize at last year’s Cannes, it hasn’t enjoyed the kind of critical success the pair usually enjoy, with detractors complaining that they fail to get inside Ahmed’s head. It depends what you mean by fail: I think the Dardennes intentionally avoid doing this but I agree the result is unsatisfying either as drama or quasi-documentary. Ahmed is an unusual, arresting but frustratingly opaque character; and the Dardennes do much less than they might have to show how much cultural forces shape his attitudes. There are fine things, even so. Claire Bodson, Olivier Bonnaud and Victoria Bluck (until the plotting plays Louise false) give particularly good supporting performances. There’s rationed and expressive use of a handheld camera, to accompany Ahmed at the points in the story where his obsession is driving him to extreme action, and a highly effective sequence in which Inès tries to justify her Arabic teaching plans to a Muslim audience holding widely differing views. Benoît Dervaux’s camerawork is an important factor here too, whizzing from one speaker to another to reflect how thick and fast opinions are coming. Ahmed’s contribution, reviling Inès for having a boyfriend who’s ‘a Jew’, stops the meeting and the camera in their tracks. The Dardennes also build a compelling, detailed picture of Ahmed’s religious rituals. Not that the repeated hand-washing seems as peculiar now as it would have done a few months ago.
26 June 2020
