L'Enfant (The Child)

My admiration for the Dardenne brothers, Jeanne-Pierre and Luc, remains remote though real. To reverse the assertion I made two posts ago, it’s just as worthy to elicit our sympathy for a low-life petty-thief man-child, who sells his infant son on the black market, as for a doomed profligate queen. But while there was a queasy fascination in watching his appalling dead-end behavior, Bruno remains more a specimen more than a person, in a real but excessively arid landscape of industrial waste space in a Belgian factory town. You evaluate his underclass pathologies more than you understand his behavior. As in the Dardennes film I found most engaging, Rosetta, there is a beautiful but bereft young girl, the clueless teen mother of the baby, to draw one into the film, but still it’s hard to generate enough sympathy to make their final reconciliation (and the boy’s potential redemption) moving and finally convincing. I give the Dardennes credit for eschewing musical cues to prod nonexistent feelings, but I was definitely left outside the minimalist emotions conveyed by their deadpan camera eye. That said, the acting is quite effective. But this film, despite (or because of) its Palme d’Or at Cannes and critical acclaim, is a tough sell. Socially engaged and spiritually ambitious, call it junkyard Bresson. Or a Dosteyevskian examination of the EU’s underbelly. Either way, it’s an acquired taste. (2005, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-87.)