THEMOVIE : L’Enfant THE DIRECTOR: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne THESTARS : Jérémie Renier, Déborah Francois In a scene very near the end of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s 2005 Palme d’Or-winning film, “L’Enfant” (“The Child”), 18-year-old Sonia (Déborah Francois) asks her petty-thief beau Bruno (Jérémie Renier) if he would like some coffee. He does, and for the next 53 seconds the camera lingers on a silent Bruno as Sonia retrieves a cup for him. Such is the attention paid to mundanity throughout “L’Enfant” by the Dardenne brothers, darlings of Cannes who also won that festival’s highest prize in 1999 with “Rosetta.” Some people might consider such languorous pacing a welcome respite in this restless day and age. Others will find it barely tolerable.
But languorousness is no match for lugubriousness in “L’Enfant,” a documentary-style drama set in a Belgian steel town that paints an uncompromisingly bleak portrait of dispossessed youth barely surviving in a world that seemingly has no use for them. The stark realism is compelling but at the same time kind of a drag, and Bruno is such an unsavory protagonist that you may find yourself — as I did — rooting against his prospective redemption. (Rated R. Running time: 95 minutes. In French, with English subtitles.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 24, 2006. Read the original PDF.