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Last night I watched Le Fils, directed by Belgium brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. I thought it was excellent. It is a story about the power of forgiveness and I was genuinely touched. The entire film was shot with hand-held cameras, which mostly followed the main character, Olivier (played by Olivier Gourmet). It must have been an intense exercise for Gourmet, as his movements and body language need, and succeed, to tell us more about his character than the sparse dialogue. You can learn a lot about somebody by staring at their back. There also no music or sound effects.

The story is told slowly but the film does not lag. The interactions between characters is authentic. Their ways of doing and saying things carried the story and developed their characters, as opposed to what they were necessarily doing or saying. Gourmet was perfect as Olivier: he communicated a justifiably curious combination of creepy, contemplative, sad and damaged – I read somewhere that this role was created especially for him (perhaps that is why his given name and the character’s name are the same).

I really had no idea where it was going. At times I thought that he was kind of perverted in his way of looking at women, and then perverted in a different way as he follows around a teenaged boy. There were quite a few times when I thought that something bad was going to happen. I felt as confused as the fictional Olivier surely did. It was riveting and satisfyingly voyeuristic to watch. The story unfolded just slowly enough. The portrayals of a troubled youth and a troubled adult, and each of their questionable need to interact, were strong and real.