#57 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series counting down the most acclaimed films of the previous decade.
You’re about halfway through L’Enfant when you realize whom exactly the title refers to. Sonia (Déborah François) has just had a baby boy, and when the movie opens, she’s seeking the child’s father. He’s not at his apartment, which is occupied by a surly couple who slam the door in her face (a gesture that will be repeated throughout the film, although eventually she’s the one doing the slamming). When she finds him he’s on the street, wandering between cars stalled at a stop light, begging for change. Bruno (Jérémie Renier) is a scruffy young man, who could be anywhere from mid-twenties to early thirties. The indeterminacy of his age is telling; while his thick features suggest a manliness, his mop of hair, puppy-dog eyes, and perpetually mischievous grin suggest perpetual boyhood. Though Sonia is clearly his junior, she manages to mix a girlish playfulness (she’s constantly goofing around with Bruno, amidst shrieks of laughter) with a motherly concern for her new charge. Bruno, on the other hand, as soon as he’s left alone with the baby, tries to sell his own son.
It’s after he arranges an illicit, impromptu adoption, belatedly informs Sonia (who passes out from the shock), and then scrambles to get the child back, calling the baby black marketers and arranging a pick-up in a garage, that we reach that halfway point. Bruno is sitting on a bus, cradling the infant (swaddled, throughout the film, in a puffy blue parka), staring numbly out the window at the grand buildings alongside the river. He had asked the kidnappers if the child would end up in a nice home, but now he certainly won’t: Sonia and Bruno get by on the proceeds of Bruno’s petty theft (his fellow gang members are about nine years old), hanging out in underpasses and sleeping in shelters when they need to lend their room to friends for money. Anyway, Bruno’s attempt to secure a better future for his boy seems a halfhearted moral gesture: it’s clear Bruno was selling the child for money, not for the baby’s own sake. After reneging on the deal, the smugglers threaten him with violence if he doesn’t recoup the losses they claim – in a few simple actions (calling a friend, bringing the child to an empty building, leaving it to be taken) he has made everyone’s situation much, much worse. And at that moment, it becomes clear that “l’enfant” is not the baby being held, it’s the big baby holding him.
Bruno is a child in charming ways as well as irritating ones, though his immaturity tends to mitigate any charisma. He seems, in some basic, stupid way essentially good-hearted, inasmuch as he doesn’t appear to wish anyone ill. Yet his unbridled selfishness constantly causes damage, to himself, to his mother (whom he tells to lie to the police), to his co-conspirators (whom he gets into scrapes that land them in the hospital and police station), and especially to his nascent family. Yet the Dardenne brothers, in an indirect, subtle way lead us to identify with Bruno – so that even as we balk at his actions, we’re never as attached to other characters as we are to him. Once he enters the story, we never leave his perspective; when Sonia collapses, though the camera swoons, we are outside her experience, coolly watching it from an emotional distance. As for the newborn, it remains impenetrable in its hooded shell: we hardly ever see its face, and it seems more an object than a person. In a way, Bruno is an object as well, though one with a modicum of intelligence: a kind of a half-human automaton, perpetually seeking to trade anything he gets his hands on for money.
The movie is stuffed with characters and situations ripe for socioeconomic commentary, yet the Dardennes focus on the one figure who, compulsive as he may be, seems the most to blame for his own situation. He disparages the idea of getting a job, weasels out of responsibility, and spends his money foolishly (buying his girlfriend a jacket to match his own, purchasing beer when he owes a grand sum to smugglers who – just his luck – happen to be in the bar). His poverty is dire (at one point, turned away from his own door, he wraps himself up in a rectangular box and sleeps by the riverside) but so is the quality of his decision-making. Finally, in the end he makes a relatively smart choice: turning himself in to take the rap for the kid he left behind, he belatedly accepts responsibility for his actions. Yet this too is an escape since he will not be able to provide for his child behind bars, and he’ll be protected from the criminals who wanted to extort him for the adoption-going-wrong. In the final sequence, visited by Sonia in jail, he bursts into tears and she cries alongside him. The pent-up frustration of the movie, a frustration created by psychology as much as sociology, finally finds its momentary release.
The world of the film is drab, but the starring couple convey a surprising modicum of glamour, swaggering in their matching jackets through the dim environs of a Euro-metropolis. The movie’s greatest virtue is its unblinking attention, not an intensity exactly, but not relaxed either. Its gaze is relentless; without any music, flashy photography, or slick editing to distract us, we float alongside Bruno in his relentless search for acquisition and release. The flowing, sometimes speeding, imagery provide a real sense of movement through space, particularly in the botched purse-snatch which provides L’Enfant with its haphazard climax. For some reason, I kept thinking of Bruno as a video-game character, gliding from place to place without much inner life, descending the levels of a sewer like they were levels on a Nintendo screen, gobbling up goods and currency and then dumping them out, like a voracious Pac-Man. It’s all he knows how to do; like the scorpion riding the frog, it’s in his nature to sting and sink. Hence the Dardennes view him with a kind of anthropological fascination, but their “objective” gaze is not entirely devoid of sympathy. The pitiful Bruno, by film’s end, seems finally ready to grow up. Unless that is, the game’s already over – or worse yet, like the aforementioned video games, destined to start up all over again.
Last film: Tropical Malady
Next film: The Gleaners & I
“The movie’s greatest virtue is its unblinking attention, not an intensity exactly, but not relaxed either. Its gaze is relentless; without any music, flashy photography, or slick editing to distract us, we float alongside Bruno in his relentless search for acquisition and release. The flowing, sometimes speeding, imagery provide a real sense of movement through space, particularly in the botched purse-snatch which provides L’Enfant with its haphazard climax.”
I think this all-encompassing statement can well apply to all of the Dardennes’ films, at least in the more animated segments, which is some of the films is less ubiquitous.
The difficulty with this film as I recall was that the main character was so unlikeable. I like the Dardennes, but this is not one of their better films.
This is the first Dardennes film I’ve seen, so I don’t have much of a frame of reference. I think there are a few more coming on the list…
I agree, although the definative tone could have been done without, with FRANK GALLO that, while good, its a lesser film than normally comes from the Dardenne’s. Yes, the gritty, visceral, detailed attitudes of the film are eccentuating the narrative perfectly but, as an enigma, the character of Bruno is so unmittigatingly self-centered and desperate that it fails to. Make the ultimate connection with the viewer. I prefer the Dardenne’s LA PROMESSE. In that film the main charactersd were theives and ceriminals, yes, but the relationship between the boy and father packed enough emotional resonance that you were engaged with them completely. The Dardenne’s are not easy to take, I understand that, their world is hard and bleak. However, in most instances a microscopic warmth does break in. Here, though interesting, the warmth never occurs. I like L’ENFANT, but its distance kept me from loving it.
Yes, L’Enfant is only better than LE SILENCE DE LORNA when it comes to the Dardennes’ films.
MovieMan, watch Rosetta. It’s excellent.
That seems to be their most-praised, definitely. Would you say it’s your own favorite?
I agree with Stephen on the Palme d’Or winning ROSETTA, which I feel is their greatest film. But THE SON and LA PROMESSE push close. And yes I also agree with Stephen that LA SILENCE is the only film below L’ENFANT, though I still like the latter, and will have more to say about your review later today after school.
Yes. It is my favourite of theirs and it’s right up there amongst some of the greatest films I’ve seen.
My Dardenne filmography is limited to this and Lorna’s Silence, and I like L’Enfant better of the two. Despite what looks like a play for pathos at the end, it impressed me as a stark deromanticization of the criminal or vagabond life. Bruno’s life is pretty contemptible but the compassion the film demands for the baby extends to him as well; that was its effect on me, at least. The Dardennes seem to use Renier as an icon of dysfunction, as if he represents a generation unfit to survive, but his abjectness is never as repulsive as it could be. There must be a point to that, but I want to see more of their films before I draw conclusions.
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