Double Palme D’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne describe their film as a love story with a missing character: the child’s father.
By: Bob Brown
With minimum of tricks and studio trappings, the Belgian Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, are carving a name for themselves in modern cinema. The present production marks their second Palme D’Or, the top prize at Cannes. This twin achievement is a distinction shared by only a handful of legendary filmmakers.
What’s more surprising is how economically they work to create powerful stories. Not only are the plots straightforward and simple, but the equipment and the methods are stripped bare. Their favorite cinematographer, Alain Marcoen, works close in with special hand-held Super 16 mm cameras. The result is intimate and voyeuristic, as if the viewer is implicated in the action as the story unfolds.
This was especially evident in Le Fils (The Son, 2002), where Olivier (Olivier Gourmet) stalks his student, Francis (Morlgan Marinne), finally confronting him in a dramatic showdown.
Contributing to the tension in Le Fils, as in the present film, are characters who, despite being clearly drawn, are always on the edge of making one fateful choice or another. They are all possibility, even while they are bound by fate and happenstance. These are characters Jean-Paul Sartre would have recognized.
Speaking of simplicity, the story for L’Enfant was born while the brothers were filming Le Fils in the town of Seraing, Belgium. "In the morning, afternoon and evening," they say in the film’s production notes, "we saw a girl pushing a pram along, with a newborn baby asleep inside it. She didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular just around with the pram. We have often thought back to this girl, her pram, the sleeping child, and the missing character: the child’s father. This absent figure," they decided, "would become our story… A love story that is also the story of a father."
In the film, the girl with the pram is 18-year-old Sonia (Déborah François), a first-time mother just home from the hospital, only to find that her boyfriend, Bruno (Jérémie Renier), has sublet their flat and has reverted to living under an overpass.
Even though they are now parents, the couple are still kids, roughhousing with each other in the grass. Their new responsibilities seem to barely register. Sonia’s meager welfare checks are the only steady support. Her attempts to find Bruno work are fruitless. He would rather supplement their income with petty theft and fencing stolen goods. "Only f-ers work," he tells her.
While standing in an employment queue, Sonia tells the fidgety Bruno to take their infant son, Jimmy, for a walk. Sonia may be hoping the father will bond with his child. Instead, as soon as he is out of her sight, Bruno phones one of his connections and arranges to sell the baby for ready cash. When he returns with an empty pram and a fistful of Euros, the incredulous Sonia falls into a swoon and is hospitalized.
In a panic, Bruno tries to undo the unforgivable and retrieve Jimmy. But given his devious methods, and his shadowy associates, he only digs a deeper hole. The wheel turns, as Sonia takes the upper hand, and Bruno is left scrambling to survive, if not to redeem himself, although that seems impossible.
The Dardennes elicit performances from their actors as though we are seeing real people. How is this achieved? Having come from documentaries, they approach fiction as unartificially as possible. In an interview with Anthony Kaufman of the online zine Indiewire, the brothers speak of their transition: "We try to keep that aspect of documentary in our fiction, to film something that resists us. So we try not to show everything or see everything. The character and the situation remain in the shadows and this opacity, this resistance, gives the truth and the life to what we’re filming."
This film bears that out. Mr. Renier, already an accomplished actor in France, seems utterly fresh. The camera lingers on faces for minutes at a time (a Dardenne specialty). We can see the subtlety of Bruno’s fleeting thoughts and emotions, the body language, while he contemplates decisions and reflects on his actions. But we don’t know what he will do.
Ms. François has impressed critics as a very promising Belgian actress, this being her first feature-length film. Her childlike Sonia becomes a fiercely protective mother, pushed into adulthood by the flaneurial behavior of Bruno, who was irresistible to her until reality set in.
Little Jimmy, who hardly whimpers (how could he know that being sold on the black market is not normal?), is glimpsed only as a pair of cheeks inside a Michelin-esque snowsuit. The infant was portrayed by 21 different babies, each making its film debut.
Like the Dardennes’ other work, the story ambles along. The characters’ intentions and events themselves seem perfectly fluid. Then the story picks up speed and events are telescoped. Tense chase scenes on the byways of Seraing, a gritty East Belgian steel town, build to a climax when Bruno must face who he is and what he wants. The denouement packs an emotional punch that is unexpected but thoroughly satisfying.
In French with English subtitles. Rated R. Contains brief language.

