Page - 18 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

18 | Isabella Guanzini www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 15–32 She continues to believe in the world, stubbornly seeking to escape the destiny of abjection and affliction that wounds her mother’s experience. In a very fran- tic and disturbing scene, Rosetta chases her dysfunctional mother, a long-term alcoholic, through the desolate landscape of the campsite where they live in order to convince her to join a rehabilitation centre: Mother: I don’t want to go out! Leave me alone! Rosetta: Come on. It’s the only way out of it. They’ll look after you. Mother: I don’t want out of it. During the struggle with her mother, Rosetta falls into the lake near the camp- site, crying desperately for help. During her distressed attempt to extricate herself from the muddy water, her mother simply goes away, abandoning her to the possibility of death. Despite the unbearable fatigue and dereliction of Rosetta’s life, she resists, believing in her dignity and struggling for her future. Their “responsible realism”9 is the expression of the Dardennes’ obstinate adherence to reality and belief in this world, its materiality and its weight. Ac- cording to Luc Dardenne, “We have lost touch with reality, we have become unable to produce, to tell, to show reality. We have never been so lonely, con- fused in madness as such, dismayed in a world that has the consistence of a fan- tasy. This situation distresses us terribly.”10 With their refusal of aestheticism, the Dardennes seek to recreate a relation with raw reality in all its intensity and violence, which the camera simply tries to follow and to show, as if the camera itself does not know what exactly could happen. Starting from this “secret agreement” (“eine geheime Verabredung”11) be- tween Deleuze and the Dardennes’ filmic perspective, this contribution aims, on the one hand, to emphasise the “discourse of the body” that is the main vehicle of their realism and belief in the world. On the other hand, it seeks to explain the loss of this elementary faith in the consistency of experience by fo- cussing on the topic of paternity and its present decline, a constant question in the Dardennes’ films, especially in The Promise and in Le fils (The Son, BE/ FR 2002). These films – but also L’Enfant (The Child, BE 2005) and Le Gamin au vélo (The Kid with a Bike, BE/FR/IT 2011) – seem to establish a particular connection between paternity – in all its dimensions – and reality: the lack of the paternal function seems to interfere with the subject’s perception of the world and the elementary encounter with the other. From a Lacanian perspec- tive, the symbolic function that the “Name-of-the-Father” supports undergoes a huge transformation process in globalised societies that are increasingly dom- 9 Cf. Mosley 2013. 10 Dardenne 2009, 36. 11 Benjamin 1991, 694.