L'Enfant
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
This review is a part of the Palme d’Or Project: a review of every single Palme d’Or winner at Cannes Film Festival. L’Enfant won the fiftieth Palme d’Or at the 2005 festival.
The film was selected by the following jury.
Jury President: Emir Kusturica.
Jury: Javier Bardem, Faith Akin, Nandita Das, Salma Hayek, Toni Morrison, Benoît Jacquot, Agnès Varda, John Woo.
It didn’t take long for Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne to win another Palme d’Or after their first award for Rosetta, as L’Enfant came out only six years later. Unlike Rosetta, whose Cannes legacy has been tethered to All About My Mother not winning, L’Enfant exists entirely on its own, with the approval from the Cannes jury in full effect (another two time winner, Emir Kusturica, headed this panel). That’s about the end of where this film is in terms of differences, because the majority of the Dardenne brothers’ films deal with the same subject matters: the working class being kicked down a tier and left to fend for their lives. Rosetta dealt with a young girl that was terminated at the end of her probation period and having to fend for herself without any proper guardians in her life. L’Enfant is almost like the sister film for this release; even though the Dardennes made projects dealing with the same subject matters, this film is particularly close thematically, as we see young parents-to-be having to rethink their lives.
Sonia and Bruno are jobless and broke, having to use government assistance to get by. Bruno is starting to get entangled in the underworld via the hasty decisions he has made to make a buck. Of course, this is where his head is when it comes to Sonia’s announcement that she is pregnant: not how he will now become a new father, and provide and nurture for this infant, but how this can help him and Sonia financially. I dare not even say what Bruno decides to do, but L’Enfant is quite horrifying with where it is prepared to go in order to make a point about desperation. When your instincts are to do whatever it takes in order to make money little by little, you likely aren’t in the right headspace to accept this level of responsibility and change. Do we point fingers at Bruno for his awful choice? I certainly do, but the Dardennes also challenge us to try and understand why someone would feel this forlorn in order to act so selfishly.
L’Enfant makes you think the film is about struggling, young parents-to-be making adjustments for their new roles; you’d be wrong.
Other Dardenne brothers films get you to feel like you are in the shoes of the protagonists, usually because you have been in similar positions before: employees having to fight for their job security in order to guarantee that your bills will be paid. L’Enfant goes the extra mile and shows you where the mind may wander to when you’ve lived a harsh enough life economically. There are so many senses of panic stuffed within this hour and a half feature that you almost feel like your own thoughts are racing. You may even wonder how you got to certain places within the film, because there wouldn’t be any organic path that would lead you towards the unthinkable.
The remainder of the picture is devoted towards both retribution and reparation, but too much damage may have already been done. Where does a new life sit amidst all of the problems that adults face? No matter what the circumstances are, a child brought into the world should instantly become the top priority of a parent, and it is through our own instincts that we assume that L’Enfant will follow suit. Instead, we see parents that are extremely young that may not understand these positions right away. As tough as life is for this couple, I absolutely dread the thought of what this newborn’s existence is going to be like, especially because of what L’Enfant details in its first days alive. There’s something symbolically sound here, potentially about how the Dardennes feel about readiness in society: we’ll never be fully prepared for how cold and uncaring the world is going to be towards us.
L’Enfant is willing to place you in highly uncomfortable scenarios to make a point about the frigidness and chaos of the struggle to survive within society.
Outside of the loose rhyme of both titles, I can’t help but be reminded of Robert Bresson’s L’Argent when I think of L’Enfant because of how each film tackles a bigger commentary through the usage of one particular symbol. In the former, we have money being moved around and creating a chain of greed and duplicity. In the latter, the Dardennes use the allegory of a newborn child to showcase our helplessness when society deals our hands for us. Bruno and Sonia are symbolically as defenceless as their infant, whether they realize it or not. In fact, many of us who have made it in life still have to trust that society won’t cause us to fall down heavily and wind up back at square one. L’Enfant is a highly effective look at family dynamics within hardship told in the best way that the Dardenne brothers know: without any frills whatsoever. There’s no distraction here: life can be absolutely hideous sometime, and the gift of life has to be cherished before the baby turns into yet another cursed member of society’s financial game.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.