Je Pense à Vous and La Promesse: From Describing to Performing

This chapter looks at two early Dardenne films, Je Pense à Vous (1992) and La Promesse (1996). The gap between these two films proved momentous in the Dardennes’ career, as they were able, after the critical, commercial and, in their eyes, personal failure of Je Pense à Vous, to rethink their approach to film style, which led to La Promesse, the true ‘beginning’ of their career as it is commonly known and their first explicit engagement with Levinas’s ethical philosophy. The chapter considers this radical change in film style to be akin to the distinction that J. L. Austin, in his lectures on performativity, makes between constative and performative uses of language, the first being description and the second being performance. The chapter begins by positing a parallel between the shifts in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy from the descriptions of Totality and Infinity to the literary performance of Otherwise than Being and the Dardennes’ reconfiguration of their style between Je Pense à Vous and La Promesse. This will show how, just as Levinas sought to clarify his ethics by deploying a more overtly performative style, so the Dardennes achieve a similar, Levinasian style in their filmmaking in La Promesse.