Page - 26 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

26 | Isabella Guanzini www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 15–32 ity of action as the interruption of automatic processes: “The life span of man, running toward death, would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning some- thing new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.”37 In this sense, the demand/interpellation interferes with the inhuman cycle of corruption, exploitation and murder, so that human affairs are not en- tirely abandoned to despair and ruin. In the time of the crisis of symbolic in- vestiture, the Dardennes believe in the possibility for subjects to be called and named: only through this process are they able to begin a new course of (ethi- cal) life. The Dardennes aim to film “the appearance of the human, to grasp the passage of goodness in the simple human trade”.38 They passionately wait with their body-camera for this contingent, eventual transition into human life, as if they were not perfectly conscious that it could really occur. Furthermore, in the Dardennes’ films, the kairos seems to be fundamentally related to the encounter with the other, namely with a symbolic father. Within these devastated human constellations, they obsessively focus on the possibil- ity to meet at least a father – Hamidou, Assita, Olivier, Riquet, Samantha, etc. – to encounter an exteriority, to experience a moral debt, to be interrupted by a law or by the face of the Other, who comes from the outside. On Bruno’s way there is the law as well. Bruno does not change thanks only to So- nia’s love. He needs to experience something that allows the law to begin to exist for him, that things could gain weight, that he could finally be there, be blocked, be in debt, that he could see for the first time what he has done, finally able to say: “It’s me”.39 Such a revelation seems to occur even outside the plot, beyond the narration, through the real encounter between bodies and faces. The camera follows the various forms of contact among the actors “from behind”, as if any abstract and previous frame could not determine and enclose characters, with the ac- tion being generated by their movements, encounters and sudden decisions. It is something that cannot be defined since it is something that ties two bodies together, forbidding them not only to disappear, but also to find their place, to rest; that is, they must remember to exist. Life realistically appears in continu- ous movement that cannot be simply fixed or represented in its occurrence. It remains open to the possibility of a new beginning. Consequently, revelation 37 Arendt 1998, 246. 38 Dardenne 2009, 45. 39 Dardenne 2009, 121. “We have to forget Dostoevskij’s Sonia. Sonia is a woman’s body, an erotic nature. But we have to remember Dostoevskij’s Sonia as well, because Sonia’s erotic nature is not enough to provoke Bruno’s conversion” (Dardenne 2009, 121).