As verité as Poids leger seems to be, its crowning moments are expressions, sincere and earnest images that muscle their way relentlessly into the film. Ameris, director of C’est la vie and Dangerous Liasons, turns to the tight, stripped-down camerawork in Poids leger that the Dardenne’s mastered in Le fils. He keeps us close to its main character, leaving little breathing room other than a few lush flashback sequences that help develop the emotional arc of the story.


The film is about Antoine, an amateur boxer who supports himself during the day by working as a gravedigger. In this occupation, he continually rehearses the loss of both parents suffered by he and his sister as children. As a teenager Antoine finds a father figure in his boxing coach and a troubled solace in his new girlfriend. But when his coach leaves town and his sister gets married he finds himself coming face to face with the opponent he has carried in himself since his parent’s death. Poids leger, literally "lightweight," documents the self-destruction brought on by Antoine’s grief, tracking the systematic implosion of his last remaining relationships. True to the cliché of most boxing films, Antoine tries as long as he can to slug this anger out in the ring, but this burden eventually proves too hard to bear alone.


One of the most troubling paintings the 20th century produced is George Bellows’ "Stag at Sharkeys." The scandal its unornamented bloodlust depicted is deservedly famous. Ameris’ great success in this film is the boxing element, tense sequences that like Bellow’s painting consolidate the frenzy of an entire match into a few frames. We are dragged into Antoine’s personal struggle through these tense abstractions of man vs. man, and the metaphor here rings clear as a bell. In Bellows’ painting we have everything from industrialization to an emerging modern angst being sweated out on the canvas by its bruised and battered brawlers. Poids leger succeeds in developing a similar feeling of senseless struggle in the life of Antoine as he eventually attempts to break back into life.


Ameris’ film previous to Poids leger (C’est la vie) featured terminally ill patients acting out the script. In his personal introduction to Poids leger at the French Film Festival UK, he described how he left this previous film in a state of despair, as many of these actors actually died during the filming. In searching for a way to articulate this grief, he stumbled upon the book Poids leger and found that it perfectly described how he felt. According to Ameris, the film is about how hard it is to say goodbye to the past, which explains why much of the film is steeped in regret and hopelessness. But Poids leger must also then articulate the sense of relief that comes from putting the past in its proper perspective, as the end of the film is one of the most remarkable shifts in emotional tenor I have experienced in a film. Thankfully, I left the theater able to shed the nameless anxiety built up by Ameris’ images.