L’ENFANT (C+)
Starring Jérémie Renier, Déborah François, and Jérémie Segard. Written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne.

The Golden Palm winner at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival features a fascinating character as its lead, but it feels detached and chilly. It keeps us and its characters at a distance, which is easy to understand: the main character, Bruno (Jérémie Renier), who sells his baby and tries to get it back without so much as a flinch of moral deliberation, is easy to condemn and tough to forgive. I think brothers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne (who wrote and directed the film) mean for him to be redeemed by film’s end, and in a radio interview included in the DVD they discuss the socioeconomic factors that produce a man like Bruno, but that reasoning doesn’t quite fly. The film shows us a class of people trafficking stolen goods for money, living in makeshift shacks and homeless shelters, but any commentary about the conditions that got them there is obscure — muted if it’s there at all. What’s left is Bruno, who has sold his baby, and for all the tears he’s made to cry he hasn’t earned redemption.

But it isn’t helpful or interesting to condemn Bruno or even to judge him. It is interesting, however, to observe how he trades in his son for cash like any other ill-gotten good. It’s here that the film should dig deep, explore the world and the history that made him who he is, the internal and external conditions that produce a man who makes such a decision. But instead the film maintains its distance, follows him as his conditions get worse, through trials that seem designed to teach him a lesson, but when he tells his girlfriend, who is horrified by his actions, “You reported me, we’re even,” it’s impossible to believe that he’s learned anything. As a result, the character doesn’t have much of an emotional arc, and we don’t really get to understand him, which leaves a hollowness at the heart of the film.

The film reminded me most of The Bicycle Thief, the great Italian neorealist film from 1948, which also explored a struggling European lower class but with more humanity. In contrast, L’Enfant feels uninvolved and thus it struggles to involve us. Its storytelling keeps its characters at arm’s length, and that’s exactly how I felt, at arm’s length from the film.