Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne | L’Enfant / 2005

children in distress

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne (screenwriters and directors) L’Enfant / 2005

Sonia has just been released from the hospital with her new baby, Jimmy, and is seeking the whereabouts of the father, Bruno. He has temporarily rented their apartment and is living on the streets, but Sonia is ready to join him with baby in arms. For neither she nor Bruno fully recognize the consequences of their acts. Bruno, who perceives any kind of employment as beneath his dignity (“only suckers work”), lives as a beggar and petty thief. And, like the two boys Bruno uses to accomplish some of the heists, Sonia and Bruno are themselves children, adult enfants who have never grown up. The first part of this beautifully haunting movie is devoted to simply establishing their infantile perspective of life, as the two poke at, chase, and tumble over one another, behaving more like naughty but loving siblings than as the sexual beings they obviously have become too early in their lives. 

 

     Sonia, alone, has begun to awaken to her new responsibility, and she attempts to arouse a sense of paternal instinct in Bruno. But while the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s camera quickly moves in close to the faces of this duo and stays there for most of the film, the baby is observed almost always at a distance, signifying Bruno’s perception of it. A website reports the movie used over twenty-one babies in the filming of the motion picture, but, except for one or two scenes when the baby cries, a doll would have done as well; for the father the child is no more than a prop. Better that it was a thing, for then it might be something of worth. Bruno recognizes a child in his world as having no meaning other an unaffordable expense. A gold chain, a ring, a

coat, a radio, and, especially a telephone are tangible things to be used or sold—things of significance because they are attained with money.

     As Sonia and Bruno stand in line to register the child, he offers to take the infant for a ride in its pram, and almost as soon as he has turned the corner, arranges over the telephone to sell it on the black market. A bus ride later, he returns, almost proudly announcing to Sonia what he has done; he now has, after all, a large wad of cash in hand. “We can have another one,” he suggests to smooth things over. The girl collapses and remains unconscious, and he is forced to take her to the hospital.

 

      Bruno now recognizes that she will “spill the beans,” and he is entrapped by his own series of horrifyingly irresponsible acts. Strangely, most of the reviews I’ve read of this movie stop here, suggesting that the film directs its focus away from the child to Bruno’s life.  Writing in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis asks, for example, “You yearn to find out who bought Jimmy, and whether his fate lies with a childless couple or an organ mill.” The point is, however, that the child and Bruno are one and the same thing.  In actuality, the film structurally rewinds itself.

     Quickly realizing that he has this time done something nearly irreparable, Bruno determines to retrieve the child and return him to its mother, an action he successfully accomplishes. In carrying his “trophy” back to Sonia, he has had, this time around, to interact with the child—if nothing else, truly recognizing his son by holding and carrying him. His deeds, however, are not rewarded with a return to normalcy, but with ever-expanding waves of dangerous consequence. The police question him; even though he has returned the money, the black-marketers threaten him, demand he work for them, beat him, and rob him of the few dollars he carries with him in order to eat; released from the hospital, Sonia refuses to speak to him and kicks him out of their apartment. Nearly starved, Bruno sleeps in a cardboard box in his riverside “hideout.”

 

     Desperate to regain the bit of turf he delusionally felt he once controlled, Bruno, like Dickens’s Bill Sykes, plans his most audacious robbery with Steve, his child accomplice. The two succeed in carrying away a woman’s bag, at the bottom of which sits the money she was about to deposit, but they are brutally chased until they must go it on foot. Clinging to the underside of a river overhang, the two are forced to partially immerse themselves in the icy water, and when they attempt to scramble back to shore, Steve falls completely into the river, nearly drowning. Bruno saves him and carries him ashore, attempting to warm up the boy’s legs enough so they can make a run for it; but the child can hardly move his lower torso and as police retrace their tracks, Bruno is forced to escape alone, leaving the child to be arrested.

      Having destroyed the only two meaningful relationships he has perhaps ever established, one an almost pedophilic connection with his child-partner Steve, the other with his girlfriend Sonia, Bruno is left so alone—which the directors perfectly capture in their camera’s almost loving obsession with the image of their anti-hero—that he has no exit left. If he has previously not recognized his own son as something of worth, out of need, if nothing else, he clearly values the life of the young accomplice. His choice to turn himself in comes with the recognition that things are now of less importance than human beings. The tears he and Sonia later share in their prison room conference are no longer those of selfish innocents but of painfully aware adults.

    In the end of this film we know that nearly all children in this world are in distress, but we don’t know if we should include Bruno himself along with Steve and Jimmy as examples of l’enfants which Belgian society has not met its responsibilities to protect.

 

Los Angeles, April 9, 2006

Reprinted from My Year 2006: Serving (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009)