Two of Cannes’s most beloved filmmakers arrive at NYFF with their worst film to date with the frequently offensive and deeply uninteresting “Young Ahmed.”
There is relatively little that happens in Jean-Paul and Luc Dardenne’s latest film, Young Ahmed. The title character is a young Muslim boy living in a small town in Belgium who finds himself enthralled in the teachings of a radicalized Imam. Eventually, he turns against the teacher he considers an infidel. After attempting to attack her, Ahmed finds himself in juvenile detention, plotting his escape and his revenge on the teacher. The slim 84 minutes of Young Ahmed does not allow for time to be wasted. The truly well-directed film captures Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi) and his every emotion in perfect detail. Unfortunately, it is in service of a completely wretched script and some of the worst storytelling I’ve seen this year. It would be shocking in any case, especially coming from such beloved filmmakers.
Idir Ben Addi as Ahmed in Young Ahmed
The Dardenne brothers have been making politically forceful films about important “issues” since the start of their career, breaking out in 1996 with The Promise and hitting peaks with films like The Kid on the Bike (about child abandonment and adoption), The Kid (about familial care and access to government support), and Two Days One Night (about unemployment and sympathy). Yet the left-leaning Dardennes have appeared to swing back around from liberalism to a truly shocking display of conservative values. The Unknown Girl had similar problems, but Young Ahmed is far less acceptable. Ahmed starts the film as a radical and never attempts to explain the why of any of his feelings. A seemingly intentional misunderstanding of Muslim culture as well turns religion into something to fight against.
There is enough to say about the content of the film and the visuals of the film that I will save for someone else to handle, but needless to say Young Ahmed isn’t a purely terrible film. In fact, it is almost that much more disappointing because it is artistically achieving high marks. Plus, the film focuses almost solely on the performance of a young and inexperienced actor, which adds to the mess. With such toxic handling of the subject matter, it is just a poor time all around.
Young Ahmed Poster
The Dardennes use the radical Muslim as a boogeyman. His faith is a structure that prevents him from happiness. His values are what drives him to violence. Even his belief in the words of the Koran makes him hate all women in his life. The sole “positively” depicted Muslim people are those who have abandoned some of the intricacies of their religion to become more ingrained in society. In other words, the Dardennes argue that assimilation is the solution. Faith is a shell game where everyone is a loser. Even Ahmed’s most positive traits (working on a farm tutoring a fellow Juvie inmate) are works that show how he needs to change, not the world.
In a time when Muslim people are more often depicted as terrorists than simple humans, Young Ahmed isn’t a film anyone needs right now. There is nothing complex about the film other than the age of the protagonist. For something truly groundbreaking, a series like Ramy accomplishes a show at why our treatment of Muslims is so devastating for the world. But the Dardennes instead care more about treating their protagonist as a Wile E. Coyote figure. Try as he might to successfully commit Jihad, he always misses it by that much. And we get to gasp at his suffering for 84 long, long minutes.
Young Ahmed will be released in 2020 by Kino Lorber
