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L'Enfant

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From the liner notes

Dispossessed twenty-year old Bruno (Jérémie Renier) lives with his eighteen-year-old girlfriend Sonia (Déborah François) in Seraing, an eastern Belgian steel town. They live off Sonia's unemployment benefits and the panhandling and petty theft committed by Bruno and his gang. Their lives change forever when Sonia gives birth to their child, Jimmy. She returns home after Jimmy's birth to find that Bruno has sublet their apartment to total strangers. After an initial and promising change of heart about becoming a father and changing his ways, Jimmy becomes little more to Bruno than a new source of wealth. Desperate for money and unable to face his parental responsibilities, Bruno sells Jimmy to a black market connection, who promises to find the child an adoptive home. Realizing the error in his actions Bruno sets out to try and undo his callous deed, leading him to a powerful personal transformation.

Review

Eighteen-year-old Sophie (François) returns home from the hospital after giving birth to her son Jimmy, to discover that her boyfriend Bruno (Renier) has sublet her apartment. When she tracks him down, he says offhandedly that the sublet ends in two days, they’ll just stay in a shelter until then.

They live in the underbelly of Seraing, a small Belgian steel town. Bruno has already blown all the money he received for the sublet. He’s is a small-time grifter, and Sophie is in love. They play like children and live hand-to-mouth. Bruno is 20 years old and dispossessed; he’s the Fagin to two younger teens, setting up robberies and muggings with them. Bruno’s credo: Only fuckers work.

While Sophie waits in line for her unemployment benefits, Bruno takes Jimmy for a walk. One of his street cohorts tells him he can get good money for the baby, and, with the same nonchalance he exhibits when asking for spare change, he sells the child. He meets up with Sophie, shows her the money, and says with a shrug that they’ll have another one. She collapses in a dead faint.

His action propels Bruno into a downward spiral of disastrous repercussions. It changes the rhythm of his daily flow; he’s now out of synch, no longer smoothly surfing over life’s insistent demands. He finds himself in situations that make his life up till then seem practically idyllic.

Reminiscent of Britain’s kitchen sink dramas which emerged in the late 1950s, L’Enfant offers strong naturalistic performances, especially from the two leads. The character Bruno is particularly multilayered, a complex amalgam of contradictory elements: ruthless yet naïve; amoral yet with his own code of conduct, his own personally defined conceptions of right and wrong. He comes to confront the life he has led, to experience catharsis and maybe receive some measure of redemption.

-- Ann Yarabinee