Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne offers little surprise in their Palme d’Or winning film L’Enfant, one of the gala screenings at Diff. Set in a bleak industrial town in Belgium, the film with its linear narrative structure and plain speak, on the surface of it, lacks the depth one comes to expect from contemporary arthouse films.
The film tells everything – from the dilemmas of a directionless youth to dysfunctional families and a failing social support system – almost in bullet point precision. L’Enfant’s take-home quotient is thus considerably reduced; there are no ambiguities to be explored, no questions to be probed.
Despite the peripheral nature of the film, rather because of it, L’Enfant becomes a modern classic for the simple reason: It captures realism subtly. You do not watch cinema; you watch life. And this film could be anywhere – relevant as it is to penury-struck women in Orissa in India to the job-less, petty thieves in Belgium, represented in the film by Bruno (Jeremie Renier). The boy isn’t bad – which is a perfect corollary to the universal truth: After all, who is bad? Who wants to be bad? Bruno is bad because he wants to live in the moment. He sells his baby without remorse because he believes he can any way have another one. But he owns up his failures, and owns up his love and eventually finds his bearing and life in love.
Simplicity is indeed the aesthetics of L’Enfant. Despite the high denominator of realism, the film isn’t stark or grim, which is its biggest surprise. There is happiness, gloom, sadness, misery – all in the every day life of the protagonists, Bruno and Sonia (Deborah Francois).
And through the portrayal of their lives, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne also take viewers through the shifting dynamics of European societies. There is a simmering tension underneath the narrative – a strain passed on by the society to individuals who simply fail to measure up to whatever decent standards it prescribes. There is also the invasion of market forces – the conflict between true need and fancy desire – as well as the break-up of relationships, often, without identifiable reasons. After all, Bruno is presented as more keen to watch his ‘target’ – the old man he must let loose young muggers upon rather than holding or seeing his nine-day old kid.
For Francois, just out of school, doing Sonia took a lot of mental preparation. “After reading the script, I felt she had to be a lot stronger than I had expected,” Francois says in an interview with The Gulf Today, before the screening of the film.
