This French drama is a superbly wrenching study of parental irresponsibility, writes Michael Dwyer COMPLETE CINEMA LISTINGS PAGES 13-16
L'ENFANT/THE CHIL
Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Starring Jérémie Renier, Deborah François, Jérémie Segard, Olivier Gourmet Club, IFI, Dublin, 95 min
PACKING an emotional punch that is wrenching to experience, and charged with the dramatic tension of an edge-of-the-seat thriller, L'enfant is the outstanding achievement to date from the writer-director team of Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. This superb film deservedly received the Palme d'Or at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, an award also taken by the Dardennes in 1999 for Rosetta.
The recurring theme at Cannes last year involved fathers seeking out lost sons, but L'enfant, in which a young man is actually willing to lose his baby son, proved more powerful than all of them. Firmly adhering to the social realist style of their earlier work, the Dardennes set the film in their familiar milieu of Seraing, an unprepossessing Belgian steel town in the Wallonie region.
The focus is on a young couple. Sonia (affecting newcomer Deborah François), who is 18, returns from hospital with her newly born son to discover that her lover, Bruno (Jérémie Renier), has sublet their apartment. Bruno is feckless and irresponsible, and although fit, drug-free and literate, makes no attempt to find work, choosing instead to live off theft.
We know Bruno is not going to be a caring father because he didn't even bother visiting Sonia and the baby in hospital. Bruno is driven by the imperative of day-to-day existence, and when a fence tells him that people will pay to adopt a child, we have every reason to fear the worst. "We can have another one," he casually tells Sonia.
The title of L'enfant is ambivalent, and equally applicable to Bruno, who, at 20, behaves with the immaturity of a child and exhibits a fear of taking on any responsibility for the baby he and Sonia have brought into the world. The consequences are scarier and more chilling than anything in a gripping horror movie, and injected with a palpable urgency and anxiety sustained through to the drama's remarkable resolution.
Tough as this material is to take, it is treated with deep-rooted concern and conviction. The Dardennes once again demonstrate their prowess at setting up a deceptively simple story and subtly drawing the viewer's rapt attention.
Renier, who was given his first leading role by the Dardennes 10 years ago in La Promesse, when he was in his mid-teens, captures Bruno in all his awkward complexity in this moving and riveting drama.
Michael Dwyer
