In the gallery of monomaniacs that appear in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s films, Ahmed is the most pitiable. It’s not as if the Dardennes make him so. Gaunt, unsmiling, the teenage Ahmed is obsessed with a fundamentalist kind of Islam. He will not shake a woman’s hand. He must pray precisely at the appointed hour. He takes down posters from his walls. Young Ahmed follows him as he moves from school to a rural reformatory. Depicting the convolutions of a young man’s spiritual yearnings should’ve produced another superb film like Rosetta, L’Enfant, or The Kid with a Bike. But Young Ahmed is a desiccated affair, as dry as a pillowcase full of twigs.
Disiciples of Imam Youssouf (Othmane Moumen), Ahmed and his brother Rachid (Amine Hamidou) turn away from modern Belgium. When he isn’t scolding their mother (Claire Bodson) for drinking or, as usual, the clothes their sister wears, he watches jihadist videos as if they were Star Wars bootlegs. He files a toothbrush into a blade. He practices running with a knife. One such video of his cousin, a more radical imam, inspires Ahmed to an act of violence against a kind math tutor Inès (Myriem Akheddiou). As a result, he’s confined in a rehab center, where the sullenness that had darkened his expression turns into rage. The patience of his counselors, who don’t want him to renounce Islam, doesn’t help. At a farm to which he’s sent as a last resort he develops a halting relationship with a fellow teen, the blonde, curious Louise (Victoria Bluck). But he hasn’t abandoned his plans to punish Ines for apostasy.
Economical by design and far from elliptical, Young Ahmed has the usual Dardennes visual elements: the camera careening around hallways and open doors; the over-the-shoulder shots that implicate the audience, blurring the divisions between subject and object. This time, however, the filmmakers don’t limn a life — they erect a symbol. Within the galaxy of impassive Dardennes performances, Idir Ben Addi as Ahmed is more stone-faced than the norml. “Why” is the interrogatory in which the Dardennes have shown the least interest; each film in their oeuvre puzzled out the ways they could use the other four w’s to show the connection between action and spirituality. In thishe Dardennnes have long operated in the spirit of Robert Bresson, whose own brief films sometimes calcified from the effort of their rigor. In the last quarter of Young Ahmed an accident befalls our young hero, setting up the opportunity for atonement. The deliberateness with which the film builds to this moment, though, has a touch of sadism; it’s as if Ahmed’s story exists to stage a redemption. The Dardennes substitute one set of pieties for another.
GRADE: B-
Young Ahmed is available for streaming on Amazon Prime.
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