Robbie COLLIN
Ahmed Abou Salem is the 13-year-old Muslim lad at the centre of the new film from Jean-pierre and Luc Dardenne; he’s been radicalised by a fundamentalist imam and is itching for DIY jihad. The Belgian brothers have spent much of their shared career chronicling Walloon working-class lives, and youthful perspectives have been a regular feature of their work, from 1996’s La Promesse to 2011’s The Kid With a Bike.
But in Young Ahmed (originally shown at Cannes last year), the boy’s point of view is toxically at odds with the film’s compassionate outlook, and the task facing those around him – his mother (Claire Bodson), caseworker (Olivier Bonnaud) and a pretty girl he meets on a young offenders’ scheme (Victoria Bluck) – is to wrest him from one to the other before it’s too late.
Ahmed’s approach to Islam is one of an obsessive teenage hobbyist: the appeal seems to be that it’s an allconsuming energy suck, an excuse to sneer at classmates and family members, and a cheap justification of keeping the opposite sex at a wary remove. When his imam (Othmane Moumen) labels his progressively minded teacher Inès (Myriem Akheddiou) a “bitch” and an “apostate”, the indoctrinated teenager takes this as his cue to intervene on Allah’s behalf by attacking her outside her flat.
This lands him in a detention centre, where a group of adults attempt to deprogramme him with a superficial appearance of success – though the boy’s blank body language and empty, glasses-shielded gaze suggest that he may be roleplaying reform. It’s a concern that his subsequent actions seem to bear out.
Meticulously capturing entire scenes in single takes in their unvarnished, observant signature style, the Dardennes are customarily attuned to inter-character tensions; this becomes their core strategy for unlocking Ahmed’s mindset. There’s a terrific scene between the boy and his mother where he complains that the labourers on the farm where he’s on a work placement are “too nice”. “Would you prefer them to be nasty?” his mother says – and she’s shocked to hear him admit that he would.
Yet fanaticism – even in one so young and theoretically still savable – is a uniquely bad match for the brothers’ methods. Because Ahmed soaks up warmth and concern and gives nothing back, he becomes the emotional version of a radio deadspot. The Dardennes have created many underdogs worth rooting for despite their flaws, but this one you’d gladly see carted off to the pound.