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The Child (2005)

Director: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne

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From Time Out London

Since radically changing tack – in terms of both working methods and narrative style – with their 1996 film ‘La Promesse’, former documentarists the Dardenne Brothers have undoubtedly taken their place among the world’s leading film-makers. It’s not just a question of having won two Cannes Palmes d’Ors in six years – first for ‘Rosetta’ in 1999, then last year for this movie (with the intervening film, ‘The Son’, managing to pick up the Best Actor prize for Olivier Gourmet). It’s also a matter of sheer consistency of quality, material, style, attitude, vision – which is to say not only that the new film’s a logical follow-up to its three magnificent predecessors, but that it’s clear, from the typically immediate opening to the likewise characteristically moving conclusion, that no one else could have made it.

Once again, the film constitutes an admirably realistic exploration of life as it’s lived on the margins in ordinary, unglamorous Seraing, an industrial suburb of the Belgian town of Liège. But while the film shares its setting and many of its themes with the Dardennes’ earlier work, they prove – quietly and with deceptively effortless ease – that it’s perfectly possible to create a work that’s utterly in keeping with its predecessors while remaining supremely fresh and devastating in its emotional punch.

Jérémie Renier (who played the son in ‘La Promesse’) returns as Bruno, an irresponsible 20-year-old happily living a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of Seraing that’s funded by goods stolen by the teenage schoolkids in his gang and by benefits paid out to his 18-year-old girlfriend Sonja (Déborah François) – who, as the film starts, has just given birth to their kid. Though in many ways almost as reckless as Bruno, she’s completely unprepared when, unbeknown to her, he arranges for the baby to be illegally adopted in return for some fast , seemingly easy money.

Things can only get worse for the couple from here, of course, but rest assured the film is far from hopeless. Any talk of the Dardennes as gloom-merchants – yes, I’m thinking of you, Grauniad subs – is inappropriate and completely misses the point; even in ‘Rosetta’ and ‘The Son’, such were the filmmakers’ clear-eyed understanding of and unsentimental compassion for their characters that endings of almost sublime grace and power were achieved. That’s true in this movie, too, though the intensely claustrophobic visual style of those two films has here been replaced by a less austere, less airless approach which focuses less on any sense of isolation felt by individuals, and more on the complexity of their relationship to one another and to the teeming, at times dangerous, world around them.

Moreover, the Dardennes and their judiciously selected cast provide a wonderfully evocative, accurate account of life on the streets; the writer-directors’ astute observations of telling details are beautifully served by naturalistic performances of enormous subtlety and conviction. Renier in particular is superb, his smile, his walk, his every glance vividly expressive of someone so caught up in the moment that consideration of an action’s consequences is virtually out of the question. And it’s Bruno’s near- childlike inability (tantamount almost to an outright refusal) to face up to the facts of cause and effect, to acknowledge even a degree of responsibility to others, that lies at the moral, spiritual and emotional heart of the film.

If that makes the movie sound dry, too philosophically serious, it shouldn’t. The Dardennes don’t make films about ‘ideas’ but about life; any metaphysical aspects of their work are always firmly grounded in the physical realities of contemporary experience. They exemplify the notion that the best way to express something of widespread or universal import is, paradoxically, to focus on the specific and personally familiar; by telling stories about recognisably ordinary folk simply trying to get by in an unremarkable town like Seraing, they end up making films that are as direct, lucid and accessible as myth itself. Furthermore, ‘The Child’ is also witty, engrossing and suspenseful. With regard to the last, several scenes stand out, perhaps most remarkable a final-act chase sequence as heart-stopping as anything in a megabuck Hollywood actioner – more so, I’d say, since those at risk are not heroes or villains but young people just like those seen daily on the streets of London or any modern town. In short, the film turns the stuff of everyday life into art. Absolutely terrific.

Author: GA

Time Out London Issue 1855: March 8-15 2006

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