Another depressing slice of realism courtesy of the brilliant Dardenne bros.

I feel as if I've been using the word 'heartbreaking' to describe too many films recently, so when I sat down to write this brief review, I promised myself I wouldn't use that word, even though this film is heartbreaking. Oops.

While not my favorite Dardennes film (that honor belongs to Rosetta), this is a an excellent, bleak portrait of babies having a baby. We see the young teenage couple struggling to survive the trials and tribulations that come with having a child, but it must be said they don't do a very good job at it. They are both deadbeat parents, of sorts, as becomes evident over the…

I couldn't help noticing that Bruno's cellphone ringtone is a foreshadowing of the unavoidably downwards spiral released as a brutal chain of consequences of crime leadership and baby trafficking in the streets of Belgium, and that the next time we heard it, we would hear it for a longer period of time than the previous one, perhaps signalling that wrong decisions were still being done.

In a faithless world devoid of Christ where people attempt to find resources with their own means and strength, the absorbing minimalism and relentless realism of the Dardenne brothers convey a sense of deep emotions, tension, love, romance, crime, danger and persecutions. It is, at its core, a moral wake-up-call tale for people to have…

71/100

[Originally published by Las Vegas Weekly.]

Even if you were to watch L'Enfant (The Child) with the sound turned off and the subtitles removed, you'd quickly realize that there's no conceivable way it could have been made in America. It's not that the characters come across as stereotypically European—neither Bruno (Jérémie Renier), the young, towheaded petty thief at its center, nor Sonia (Déborah François), his moon- and whey-faced girlfriend, spends any time sipping espressos in sidewalk cafés, both of them being too preoccupied with moment-to-moment survival. Nor does the small, dingy factory town of Seraing, where Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (La Promesse, Rosetta, The Son) invariably shoot, look all that different from, say, the crummier sections of…

Part of Lise and Jonnie’s What A Wonderful World: May 30 days, 30 countries.

I think I have a particular allergy to the Dardanne Brothers.

I dropped into this morning’s screening of the Palm D’Or winning L’Enfant oblivious to the fact that it was a Dardanne. I saw the critical darling Kid with a Bike a few years ago at TIFF and pretty much hated it.

As L’Enfant unfolded, I began to feel that same revulsion. I was well rested, not in a bad mood, just open to what was unfolding but I HATED the titular Enfant Terrible Bruno. Now, I’m sure wiser film lovers would say ‘that’s the point’. Well, not for me. The opening few scenes of his…

A production-line batch of continental petty-crime realism, which had its fair share of fateful happenings, but which shifted its gaze too readily to its closed book of a protagonist.
The relationship which showed itself after the opening search for Bruno had some ebullient breakings out of high spirits, although the jamming of the camera into each partner’s face did not uncover evidence of a storm raging in the brain behind, leading to a sense of so far, so what?
Then came the gambit, and although it was a difficult gambit to take, given Bruno’s distracted, but not inhuman, air up to that point, it was a gambit which led to a succession of scenes which made the question ‘what have…