Regarde Jonathan / Jean Louvet, son oeuvre

’Regarde Jonathan’ highlights the work of dissident playwright Jean Louvet through highly impressionist montages (a lone boxer, moving trains, dancing feet) and Brechtian restagings of his work (dramatic readings, minimalist sets, and snippets of text). The Dardennes interview Louvet, who co-founded the Proletarian Theatre of La Louvière after the Belgian worker demonstrations of 1960, and the playwright’s stream-of-conscious reflections on his craft combined with the Dardennes’ visual experimentation make for a very dense and heady experience. ’Regarde Jonathan’ strongly anticipates the Dardennes’ first dramatic feature, ’Falsch’ (1987), in its minimalist milieu and theatrical lighting. "We aim to explore a form," the Dardennes explained, "a style that rediscovers the cinema while being faced with the text of a play; and to rediscover this text through framing, glances, montage, the play of the actors, and the relationship to a place that is somewhere between a set and the realistic reference".