L’Enfant
November 18th, 2006
L’Enfant won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but it’s going on our worst-of-year list. The set up is interesting enough: a homeless teenager leaves the hospital with a newborn, and her small-time crook boyfriend decides that it would be a good idea to sell the baby for a handful of cash. The technical term for this kind of a man is “raging asshole,” and instead of giving us the mother’s story, the film’s focuses on him as he tries to steal enough money to buy back the child, avoid the cops, and dig himself into an ever-deeper hole. It would have been a challenge to make this character even borderline likable, but the Dardennes don’t even try. The amount of callousness, stupidity, and ignorance on display is overwhelming, and in the unearned final scene, we’re suddenly asked to embrace the babymonger’s unlikely redemption. This is the kind of preposterous fake-gritty hokum that gives art house film a bad name–call it the Crash of Cannes.
L’Enfant. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2005. *
[tags]film, dardenne brothers, belgium, cannes, palme d’or, baby, fathers, 1 star, crooks, suffering, asshole, gritty[/tags]
November 18th, 2006 at 8:03 pm
I like the word babymonger.
You are are so right. We are supposed to believe that this is a redemption story, when really, prison for this particular babymonger equaled a warm bed, dry clothes and protection from the thugs.
October 13th, 2007 at 12:41 am
I really liked the film, actually.
The last scene is not meant to be taken as a redemption. For the tearful, acutely painful embrace to be classified as the redemption of Bruno, the character of Sonia would have to be defined as some kind of virtuous figure, capable of giving meaningful forgiveness. Sonia is not virtuous. She is flawed and ignorant.
The film plays in the shady gray area that exists between people’s multi-faceted motivations. Bruno is goaded forward by his lust for money but, coexisting with this destructive greed, is love. The love is frequently pushed aside in favor of other things but it is still present.
It is this quality of love that comes out in the last scene. Whether that love is manifest in desperate longing for contact, anguished self-pity, or simple, uncomplicated need for closeness, Sonia and Bruno share something in this love. They are both feeling so intensely at this point that they have forgotten what “should” be. Sonia is drawn to Bruno in a way that is at once illogical, destructive, and overwhelming. She is in love. He is in love. This love that is so passionately experienced is not noble, it is not redemptive, it is not even pure. This love, in both Bruno and Sonia, is evoked by desperation, by sadness, by a penetrating fear of what the future will bring.
This love brings pain. I think that the film is constructed around this idea.