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…

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…

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…

More than anything else, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's L'Enfant highlights the subtle difference between a moral movie and a moralizing one. The action of this film is predicated entirely upon the moral (or amoral) choices of its characters, but the filmmakers are so careful not to interject their own commentary or to make any larger statements about human nature that the result is something far more powerful and profound than condescendingly saying "X is good, Y is bad." The Dardennes simply point the camera at their story and say "this is what it is."

It tells the story of Bruno, a callous and immature petty thief who exists at the very bottom of Belgian society. We first see him through…

Bruno, what the hell are you thinking?

Here is a character so unapologetically horrifying, not because he's in any way some big, bad, obvious villain. He's not. His villainy stems from a natural temptation for greed, laziness, and from losing all touch with his ordinary emotions. He doesn't get that others around him are still in touch with theirs, which raises some questions: 

Did Bruno come to earth hardwired as a self-preserving sociopath? Or scarier, did he learn this lifestyle from a cutthroat social existence (a dog-eat-dog market) and is now living out the nightmare that consumerism has bewitched him with?

For as terrifying as this human being is, the Dardenne brothers have a fascinating obsession with him similar to…

I Dardenne sono stati premiati a Cannes da Cronenberg e Kusturica e hanno sempre surclassato opere importanti (Ghost Dog, Tutto su mia madre, Una storia vera, A History of Violence, Broken Flowers, Le tre sepolture, Caché). Questo è solo il secondo film dei fratelli che riesco a vedere, ma già avverto tutta l'urgenza di premiare queste loro opere semplici e realistiche, versioni aggiornate e contestualizzate di Rossellini e la nera francese. L'enfant è un noir senza colpi di scena e sparatorie, tesissimo e che ha già generato seguaci. La stupidità infantile del protagonista - liberata dalla patina del killer giustiziere - è tutta del più che buono "Pericle il nero" di Stefano Mordini. Jérémie Renier è molto bravo ovviamente e…