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+ Best Belgian Movie of the Year + Best Box Office Disaster of the Year + Best Youth Movie of the Year + Most Under-appreciated Movie of the Year
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| The head of a boy mixed up badly by Islam, the poster for Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Young Ahmed |
Ahmed is a young teenage boy, who has changed radically due to the influence of a local radical imam. He is now convinced that the teacher who has helped him overcome dyslexia is a heathen, and that he will serve Allah by killing her.
Young Ahmed is written and directed by Belgian master filmmaker brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Falsch (1987)).
It follows the Dardenne modus operandi of being an observant portrayal of individuals of small means, who are in a life crisis. Like one of their past best films, The Kid with a Bike/Le Gamin au Vélo (2011), Young Ahmed is about an adolescent. The film gives real insights into the obsessive nature of radical Islam and portrays how ingrained and hard to remove a persuasion in this misdirection can be, like hardened grease on this inside of a human skull.
As the poor, deranged boy without a father, who turns on his Belgian mother and compulsively washes hands and mouth (of the world and his immediate surroundings' 'uncleanliness'), Idir Ben Addi is remarkable, and his harsh facial expressions and awkward body disconnect perfectly expresses the human handicap that religious fanaticism has made him a (dangerous) victim of. The film also has terrific performances from Myriem Akheddiou (The Benefit of the Doubt/Une Part d'Ombre (2017)) as Ahmed's patient, taxed teacher and victim, Claire Bodson (Our Children/À Perdre la Raison (2012)) as his outraged, wounded mother, and young Victoria Bluck as the beautiful girl Louise, who shows affection for Ahmed at the farm where he is attempted normalized, - but who won't follow him into the doldrums of Islam.
The Dardennes have rarely picked a more timely or bold topic for a film than here, following countless cases of radicalization and Islamic terrorism in their native Belgium and many neighboring European countries in the last decade. Young Ahmed leaves it to the audience to explain why Ahmed exactly winds up radicalized; but the clues are there: The local, assertive radical imam, the missing father and Western mother (ready to be blamed for anything by a naturally rebellious youth), and the mysterious X individual quality (or curse?) that makes one out of maybe 100 people fiercely religious while the 99 others are much less so. The film observes with elegant photography (by Benoît Dervaux (Post Partum (2013)), SPOILER how Ahmed quite deviously decides to manipulate his surroundings into thinking that he is de-radicalizing, - just so that he can attempt to murder his teacher again.
We are left to make our own conclusions based on the highly naturalistic, - and deeply terrible, - story that unfolds in the film, which is ultimately not without hope and humanism, which characterize all of the Dardenne films. I was especially appalled by the Belgian authorities' uniform willingness to accommodate Ahmed's fanatical religiousness: asking his permission before playing the radio; helping him with the time continually to please his sick praying routines etc. etc. - when these inhibitions all stemmed from the core of the very problem in the boy's troubled life: Islam. Young Ahmed should be seen widely and used in classrooms across the world.
Related post:
2019 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
Cost: 6.1 mil. €, approximately 6.91 mil. $
Box office: 1.5 mil. $
= Box office disaster
[Young Ahmed premiered 20 May (Cannes Film Festival, in competition) and runs 84 minutes. 14 companies and support bodies were involved with financing and making the film. Screen Brussels' investment of 115k € in the film is listed as 1.86 % of the full budget, which therefore comes to 6.1 mil. €. The film opened #66 to a 4k $ first weekend in 2 theaters in North America, where it spread to 4 theaters but only lessened in position before getting wiped out by the corona pandemic, which has hurt its release in general. It grossed 21k $ (1.5 % of the total gross) in North America. The 3 biggest markets have been; France with 1.1 mil. $ (78.6 %), Italy with 159k $ (11.4 %) and the Netherlands with 113k $ (8 %). The film has one market announced to open in soon; Hungary on 2 July. It won the Best Director award in Cannes; it was nominated for a César award and won 2/9 Magritte award nominations (Belgium's Oscar), among other honors. The Dardenne brothers do not have an announced next film yet, and Addi also does not have any upcoming role announced yet. Young Ahmed is rotten at 58 % with a 6.68/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Young Ahmed?
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