L’Enfant (2005)
Thursday, August 24th, 2006
Written & Directed by: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Cast: Jérémie Renier, Déborah François, Jérémie Segard, Fabrizio Rongione, Mireille Bailly, Olivier Gourmet, Stéphane Bissot
Runtime: 100 min.
Rating: R
Trailer
A helpless child is one of the first images captured in L’Enfant. The child is huddled in a blanket, crying, as the mother, Sonia (Déborah François), climbs the stairs to her Belgian flat, which, unbeknownst to her, has been sublet to strangers by her boyfriend, Bruno (Jérémie Renier). Yet, the baby we see is not the titular character. Instead, the introduction to the child comes a few minutes later through the guise of Bruno, a young and petty thief begging for change from idling motorists stopped at a traffic light while ignoring the cries of Sonia to look at the baby he has helped conceive. His mind is always scattered, emotionally irresponsible, and immature. It is only after a horrendous and despicable act of cowardice and indecency that Bruno ventures down the road of redemption, struggling along the way into adulthood and responsibility.
Knowing that people pay a lot of money for a baby on the black market, Bruno calmly sells the child away for a few thousand dollars. Bruno’s explains his actions to Sonia a few hours later as simple necessity. They needed the money, the child needed a family better equipped to take care of him, and they can always have another child later on - a child they can presumably keep. To say that Bruno is despicable from the outset is an understatement. A petty criminal and the ringleader of a small gang comprised of a 14-year old boy named Steve (Jérémie Segard), Bruno wanders day-to-day desperately scrounging up minor scores to help pay for food and a little entertainment. Even when Sonia arrives with the baby, haphazardly named Jimmy, Bruno constantly needs reminding that the child exists at all.
In addition, whatever little money it scrounged up, it is always spent fruitlessly on superficial and arbitrary vanities like matching jackets and one-day car rentals. Yet, regardless of the qualities that make Bruno despicable as a father and inept as a thief, there is a strange, quintessential child-like innocence innate in his actions that hints at his redemption later in the film. After Sonia faints at the news of her son’s sale, she is taken to the hospital where Bruno vows to get the child back. What follows is a series of scenes designed as penance for his transgressions as a father and member of society, capturing Bruno’s atonement of sins even if Bruno is completely oblivious of his underlying motivation.
The Dardenne’s shoot L’Enfant in their cinéma vérité brand of filmmaking, capturing the reality of the neighbourhoods, the characters, the language, and social fabric through film grammar that is explicitly their own. The shaky camera work and hurried improvised framing, the lack of music (even during the end credits), and a clean, singular narrative, all help pull off the arduous task of presenting fiction disguised as reality. Their actors, most of them non-professional, create living characters without any of the self-reflexive mannerisms that litter conventional performances, and instead rely on naturalistic and nuanced shades that delicately straddle the line between documentary, neorealism and fiction.
With their films, the brothers portray plainly evident and unapologetically humanistic stories that concern groups of people left out of normal society, pushed to the periphery to be ignored and forgotten. Through all of their stylistic conceits, the overall effect is to produce a film that instantly commands your attention, linking you as a viewer to the action with immediacy that is impossible to thwart, creating a heightened involvement with the characters’ actions. When a despicable character like Bruno finally does redeem himself, it is not just to Sonia but to society as well. Bruno’s enlightenment at the end is an awakening, a realisation that the life of a child can only take him so far, and that adulthood is more than an age, it is a state of mind. With L’Enfant, winner of the Palme d’Or at last years Cannes Film Festival, the Dardenne’s have created a naturally beautiful and haunting portrait of a man’s rebirth, captured through a narrative that is ultimately haunting in its realism and wonderfully uplifting in its understated humanism. Although it is sometimes extremely difficult to sit through, L’Enfant eventually reveals itself a champion of the goodness humanity can still offer up, despite the stifling social complexities and malaise threatening around every corner.
Richard X
© Cinephile Magazine, 2006
