L'Enfant (2005)

I have just about given up predicting which film is likely to win the Palme d'or at Cannes each year, since the jury can range between selecting a popular and potentially commercial choice and a film guaranteed to leave the viewer depressed.  It is therefore remarkable to me that the Belgian Dardenne brothers have won twice, first in 1999 for "Rosetta", a downer about an unemployed young woman living with her alcoholic mother, and more recently with the above slice of life.  Why is it that 'slice of life' films always seem to focus on the more unsavoury slices?

"L'enfant" is the tale of 20-year old Bruno who has never worked an honest job (those are for wimps) and who lives off his 18-year old girlfriend Sonia's state benefits and the odd bit of larceny.  When she leaves hospital with their new-born son, Bruno gets the wheeze that there is a good market for selling infants which he proceeds to do, thinking that the money will please her and that, oh well, they can always make another kid.  Unfortunately not only does she collapse when he tells her what he has done, but when he manages to retrieve the baby for her, he finds himself in debt to a group of hard men who expect him to repay the profit they would have made.  Things go from bad to worse when Sonia reports Bruno to the police and also (quite rightly) refuses to have any more to do with him.  Although their original relationship was loving by its own peculiar standards, in fact Bruno was also some kind of child, never thinking about the outcome of his actions.  In the end when he ends up in jail after admitting his guilt in a robbery where his 14-year old accomplice was arrested, Sonia comes to see him and they wind up in tears together.  Perhaps the viewer was meant to take this as some sort of redemption, but to me it was just the very juvenile Bruno feeling sorry for himself like the big baby he is. 

Tags: L'Enfant, Dardenne Brothers