L'Enfant

Director: Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne

2005 / 95min / 35mm

“An infant is born into this world. His parents are homeless minors. The father, Bruno (Jérémie Renier), a feckless hand-to-mouth street hustler, casually sells the baby to black-market traffickers and then, astonished by his girlfriend’s hysterical reaction, must scramble to recover the child. As Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne’s 1999 Cannes laureate Rosetta suggested a Marxist remake of Bresson’s Mouchette, so their second Palme d’Or triumph, L’Enfant, revisits Bresson’s more abstract Pickpocket in its saga of crime and punishment… Above all, this is an action film—or better, a transaction film. It’s not just that the Dardennes orchestrate an exciting motor scooter purse-snatching and a prolonged hot pursuit. L’Enfant is an action film because every act that happens is shown to have a consequence.”—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice