L'Enfant (The Child), winner of the Palme D'Or at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, is a fully realized, powerful work of art that brings back Jérémie Renier, ten years after his impressive debut in La Promesse. Set in an industrial city in eastern Belgium, L'Enfant contains the unmistakable Dardenne trademarks: a shaky hand-held camera, natural sounds with no background music, a concern for the underclass that globalization left behind, and a gritty and realistic look and feel.
Bruno (Ranier) and his girlfriend Sonia (Deborah Francois) live on the margins. He is a low-level thief, panhandler, and slacker who refuses to work and can only support his girlfriend by illegal means. He lives for the moment rather than in the moment, pursuing instant gratification without thinking of how his actions may affect others. When she comes home from the hospital after giving birth to a baby boy she names Jimmy, she finds that Bruno has sublet her apartment in order to buy a jazzy windbreaker with stripes. With no apartment to go home to, the two are forced to huddle together on a cold embankment.
While Sonia waits in a long line for her unemployment check, Bruno, acting on a tip from a fence, impulsively decides on his own to sell Jimmy to a criminally connected adoption agency without thinking about how Sonia will react. The Dardennes do not tell us how to feel about Bruno and we are left to sort out our own reactions. Like the Dardennes' earlier films, the power of L'Enfant is cumulative. As Bruno evolves and we become more aware of his vulnerability, our capacity for forgiveness is challenged and the film prompts us to grow along with the character. In an ending that is unique and painfully touching, L'Enfant achieves a rare authenticity.
The Dardenne brothers' Palme d'Or-winning drama concerns a young man on benefits who decides to sell his girlfriend's baby. Although the scenario may appear bleak, the Dardennes create an ultimately optimistic and almost spiritual mediation on humanity.
The films of Belgium's Dardenne brothers are simple enough in form to have been claimed (with varying degrees of accuracy) as modern morality plays or Christian parabl... more >
The films of Belgium's Dardenne brothers are simple enough in form to have been claimed (with varying degrees of accuracy) as modern morality plays or Christian parables. Consequently The Child, though a winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, rather missed its audience upon its cinema release. Now here's the opportunity to catch up with an outstanding work of realist cinema.
Fresh from the maternity ward, young Sonia (Déborah Francois) clutches her swaddled offspring to her chest as she roams the streets of an unpromising industrial town. Bruno (Jérémie Renier), the immature father, is a fence in a jaunty hat. In Bruno's world, everything is a transaction, a situation made frighteningly apparent when father uses son as collateral.
However grim that sounds, The Child's underlying theme of redemption isn't so far removed from the recent foreign-language crowd-pleaser Tsotsi. Amazingly - miraculously even - Renier's precisely directed performance gives us something to root for: that Bruno might grow up. And that he might be allowed to grow up, through an unpredictable last-reel motorcycle chase that a summer blockbuster would frankly kill for. < less
