L'Enfant (2005)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have made several extremely good films that are characterized by a moral clear-sightedness. L'Enfant, like other Dadenne movies, has a rather everyday setting but from this setting, deep problems and questions arise. The main character, Bruno, has become a father. We see him together with his girlfriend Sonia. When he hears about the baby, he acts as if this is nothing to stir any trouble about. Bruno lives day by day, taking part in a number of petty crimes. One day Sonia tells him to watch the child. Bruno makes a deal with some people; he goes to an empty-seeming apartment and leaves the child there. In exchange, he gets a nice sum of money. So what is this, an episode of Oprah? The Dardenne brothers make movies about desperate people. Bruno is not only desperate, he is also cruel. Instead of passing judgment on him, L'Enfant makes us look at what he does. The camera follows him around and takes us to busy street-crossings, deserted houses and his mother's apartment to which he goes to ask her to lie to the police. I instantaneously care about these people, knowing next to nothing about them. I care because of the kind of attention to film directs at them.

The film is set in an industrial town. We sense that many people there are in Bruno's position. He is a young kid with nowhere to go. We see him with Sonia. They take shelter in a private world - a very fragile world. And we see this world shattered. Bruno tries to appear like to tough guy in charge of his life. The film shows in which ways this appearance is a lethal one. It does so without moralization. The Dardennes are not pointing fingers at poor people. Their film reveals a world. Like Bresson, there is a resolute sense of moral crisis here, but this is not a moral crisis where you are lead to say things like 'youth of today....' or 'these people should get a job....' L'Enfant is, as I see it, a film about what it is like to live with what one has done. There are no short-cuts on the map.  What I think separates the Dardennes' films from many others are their awareness of poverty as a wide, societal issue, an issue connected with the meaning of life and the everyday struggles of people who live in what is often represented as the margins of society. 'The margins of society' has become an expression so common and so thoughtlessly used that we seem all to familiar with it, even though we are not. The expression has become a cliché that often marks a certain distancing in how poverty is discussed. The Dardennes take us away from these clichés. Their films offer an unsparing confrontation with such detached clichés.