Young Ahmed Review: The Dardennes Fail to Imagine an Aspiring Radical’s Inner Life

With Young Ahmed, writer-director Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne apply their pared-down aesthetic to especially provocative subject matter: the radicalization of a teenager living in a small Belgium village. At the start of the film, Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi) has already fallen in with a manipulative mentor, Imam Youssouf (Othmane Mouman), who sees everyone but himself as an apostate. Drinking in Youssouf’s teachings, which increasingly endorse jihad, Ahmed is immediately seen as closed-off and incapable of empathy, calling his mother (Claire Bodson) an alcoholic and harassing his teacher, Inès (Myriem Akheddiou), for daring to teach Arabic in a fashion that children find pleasurable.

Over the years, the Dardennes’ aversion to melodrama has been revelatory, allowing small moments to reverberate with an impact that underscores the profound majesty and terror inherent in everyday life. And, on the surface, Young Ahmed feels like a classic Dardenne production, as it’s been staged with their customary docudramatic urgency.

Compact tracking shots capture Ahmed’s escalating frustration, turning his attempts to protest his school and family into miniature studies of process. A few of these sequences are brilliant, particularly the long wind-up preceding the scene in which Ahmed tries to kill Inès for utilizing pop music as a teaching tool. The Dardennes emphasize the chilling carefulness with which Ahmed wraps a knife up in napkins; even in murder, he’s a diligent student, eager in his way to please and be heard. When Ahmed takes a swing at Inès, the Dardennes time it so that we are as shocked as she is, even though we’ve already witnessed an excruciatingly suspenseful scene in which Ahmed diligently makes his way up to her classroom.

But the Dardennes’ minimalism also feels like an evasive and self-congratulatory stunt in Young Ahmed. In many of their films, elliptical structures communicate the scattershot-ness of people’s lives, suggesting an endless string of calamity and confusion. Here, though, the ellipses suggest an unwillingness to imagine the inner life of an aspiring radical. The Dardennes’ decision to begin the film with Ahmed already in the sway of repressive, violent ideology is a deliberate one, so that his emotional fall won’t be the focus of the audience’s attention. Initially, the Dardennes don’t exactly engender pity for Ahmed, as that response would compromise their fetishizing of his impenetrability as a testament to their own humanist bona fides. In other words, the Dardennes maintain a distance from Ahmed as a way of celebrating their refusal to reduce him to any easy psychological bullet points, which ironically reduces him to something else: a signifier of their virtue.

Yet Ahmed’s seduction by Youssouf is still fleetingly “explained” with references to family trauma that unsurprisingly suggest that Ahmed has daddy issues and is looking for a mentor. The Dardennes don’t dramatize these traumas, as such events might destabilize the plaintive quotidian mood they cultivate throughout and require them to stretch and challenge the strict boundaries they’ve applied to this subject matter. Other key moments are astonishingly left off screen as well, such as when Ahmed’s mother learns that her son has attempted murder. Such scenes would probably provide the audience with an emotional catharsis, which would disrupt the traditional Dardenne formula of delaying such a crescendo until the final moment.

Young Ahmed is staked entirely on dolling out suggestive bread crumbs, until we’re finally permitted to cry when Ahmed learns the error of his ways—a moment that’s as pat as it is well-staged. In the end, the film is melodramatic, though it’s pitched at arthouse audiences who see themselves as superior to melodrama. In Robert Bresson’s work, delayed gratification suggests the holiness of all moments, climatic and ordinary alike—a state that the Dardennes have achieved in the past on their own stylistic terms. In Young Ahmed, though, this device empowers them to prune their thorny subject matter down to an inspirational punchline.