Spare to middling
The Child (L’enfant), dir. Jean-Pierre Dardenne.
The Dardenne brothers (Luc Dardenne is the producer and writer) have earned quite a name for themselves making super ‘spare’ cinema. They strip their stories back to the barest tick and throw any notion of swelling emotion to the wind. Their films (Rosetta, The Son) rely on no fancy footwork, just plain people in bad places. While I admire the sentiment, I have trouble with the result.
Bruno and Sonia are a couple in love. Or at least in one another’s company. When Sonia comes home from hospital with their newborn child she finds that Bruno (in search of a quick buck) has sublet her apartment to complete strangers and that she has to hitch a ride into town, on the back of a motorbike (baby in arms), to introduce Bruno to their son. He doesn’t show much interest, but Sonia doesn’t seem to care.
Living in a bleak industrial town somewhere in Belgium, the couple live moment to moment. Bruno is a Fagin sans charisma, using children to steal and peddle stolen goods. Sonia doesn’t judge him; she just trips along behind, sleeping in hostels and queuing for government titbits.
Bruno teeters on the moral edge in everything he does. Emotionally and socially disconnected, he acts on reflex to survive, until a profoundly reckless act forces him to take stock.
The Child was this year’s winner of the highly coveted Palme d’Or Prize at Cannes (as was Rosetta in 1999). While clearly the Dardenne brothers are a jury favourite, I’m left wondering. There is so little meat on the bones of these films that it is virtually impossible to engage with the characters on screen. A cool observational distance is one thing, but the Dardenne brothers take it to a whole new level.
While the emotional and visual gluttony of much cinema can be manipulative and shallow in the extreme, the pointed lack of it can be as manipulative in the reverse. No matter how much you take away (music, constructed sets, model beauty, artificial lighting, melodrama and everything else besides), what is on the screen is still a construction, an artificial manipulation. And in the case of The Child, the stripped aesthetic (in both story and picture) became more important than the drama unfolding. Ironically, the art of ‘nothing’ became a distraction rather than a clearer road to the truth.
Siobhan Jackson