What a refreshing gift is La Promesse, a coming-of-age story that isn't about a 15-year-old learning to indulge his adolescent libido but rather learning despite great odds against him to act with humane self-giving when a neighbor he has been trained to exploit is in dire straits. This is the second recent Belgian film release that has earned my enthusiastic praise (see also The Eighth Day). It should get a place among youth literary classics like A Separate Peace, Catcher in the Rye, and East of Eden for defining a young person's struggle to keep up family loyalties, emerge into manhood and economic responsibility, get an education, and discover and own his values.

Set in the Belgian "rust belt" town of Seraing, an economically beseiged city of abandoned steel mills and other heavy industries now outdated, its unlikely protagonist is blond and pimply faced Igor, who puts Wite Out on his teeth to make them look better, lives to ride his Moped and go-cart with his buds, and tries to be a good son to his blatantly unscrupulous father, Roger, and pass muster as an auto mechanic's apprentice. Roger not only requires Igor to be his parnter in the family business of smuggling and exploiting illegal aliens from Africa, Turkey, and newly opened Eastern European bloc countries, he expects him to steal, lie, cheat, and "use" in every way he can to make a dishonest living, having given up on making an honest one.

And Igor shows signs of having adapted quite well. In the first scene he steals and covers up, as slick as a pickpocket, the wallet of a customer at the garage where he's an apprentice. Moments later he is pointing out all the factories along the Meuse River to a vanload of illegals and assuring them this means lots of jobs, knowing all the while that the factories are all closed. Despite his diminutive stature, he shakes up the tenants in his father's clandestine boarding house and spies on them to gain nefarious advantages and, probably, "use" them in yet another way for his own indulgence. But when one of the illegals, Hamidou, falls from a scaffold in a rush to avoid government inspectors and begs Igor with his last words to look after his just-arrived wife and baby, he is forced to put away childish things and illusions about his "heroic" father and do something right, something good, for once in his life.

The writing-directing team of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (who seem the Belgian equivalents of Michael Moore [Roger & Me]) say they were inspired while working on this film by a son in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, who was obsessed by his own complicity in all the crimes of mankind. Igor, played very believably by Jeremie Renier, is not so deep as all that, but by the time the film ends he has gone through a metamorphosis in realizing and attempting to atone for his complicity in the crimes of his father, which the audience knows will make him a better-than-average man. And in the process he has taught the audience to feel and care about his process and the victims of his and Roger's callousness. What more can we ask of a movie?

(If you answered "entertainment," you'll want to read
Steve Rhodes' much different take on La Promesse.)