L’Enfant (in French with English subtitles) won the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2005. It could only have been made in France—okay, it was made just across the border in French-speaking Belgium, had a French producer, etc. There is a je ne sais quoi about the film that says it could not have been made in the United States or Germany or even Australia. You sort of have to reach out to the film because the film makes little effort to grab you with flashy techniques. It looks and sounds like a documentary of two street kids—all the settings seem real rather than set up on a sound stage, the camera is often hand-held, the lighting is flat and natural, and no music grabs our attention and tells us how to feel. Bruno (Jeremie Renier) and Sonia (Deborah Francois) go about their business. He runs a little ring of underage petty theives. She returns from hospital with their baby which, at the first impulse, he sells for illegal adoption. Her reaction sets off—or is the first of—a series of events that shatter Bruno’s childish existence.
Although directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne take a risk with a main character who is despicable, they convey in masterful and subtle ways that he is not as bad as a summary makes him sound. For one, he is like a child. He’s not mean and nasty but self-centred. He’s not a devious criminal mastermind, but a paltry middle-man between clever little theives and a higher-class fence. He even runs his racket on the honour system: The kids ask what he got for the goods, he tells them the truth, and then he gives them their share of the profits. In additon, partly through its desolate urban setting, has an underlying sense of “When being a father is one of the most important things in a human society, what kind of a society produces such a pathetically irresponsible father as this?”
When Sonia reacts to the loss of the baby, Bruno immediately starts behaving more responsibly. He takes care of her, and it slowly dawns on him how much he cares about her. He tries to get the baby back, and takes his knocks in that process as well. He and one of his young accomplises stage a purse snatching that goes wrong, and . . . I won’t give away the ending except to say that I found the redemption entirely believable.
Jim Bell