'Young Ahmed' Is A Flawed But Complex Character Study
The premise — young Belgian Muslim sets out to murder one of his teachers — has drawn sharp criticism; the film itself is "hugely flawed" but more thoughtful than the controversy surrounding it.
Throughout a career chronicling the poor and disenfranchised, the Belgian filmmaking duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have trained their handheld cameras on patterns of behavior, as if their characters are penned in by an invisible fence. In their 1999 breakthrough , a 17-year-old girl has an almost feral determination to scrap for whatever odd jobs or low-wage gigs she can get to move her and her alcoholic mother out of a trailer park. The title of their refers to the amount of time a factory worker (Marion Cotillard) has to persuade her fellow employees to give up their bonuses so she can keep her job. Desperation gives them a narrowness of purpose.
