WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

	Milos Stehlik

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There's only one action required when you hear about the most recent films of the Brothers Dardenne, L'Enfant or The Child. Just go and see it. It is a film not to be missed, not because it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year, but because like all great works of art, it reaches deep into our insides, unsettles and unnerves us, provokes and disturbs, and makes us think about that elusive and too-often-forgotten subject called “the human condition.”

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who were barely a blip on the world film scene ten years ago, have quickly accumulated a body of work that is singular, resolute, and tremendously focused. They are the film world's Dostoevsky of our age. Their films La Promesse, Rosetta, The Son and now The Child are all powerful and extraordinary. The power of the brothers' films comes from their close observation of people who are both normal and marginal, living or surviving but always on the edge of the precipice, their world just barely held together. They act without thinking, they are driven by inner impulses which we, as the audience, only comprehend later as being far too understandable and ordinary given the gravity of their actions and their consequences.

The Child is the story of a young couple on the lowest fringes of the social ladder. As the film opens, Sonia, the 18-year-old girl, has just been released from a hospital. Carrying the child which she bore, she is searching for the baby's father, 20-year-old Bruno. Bruno is a petty thief. He is constantly onto the next deal. Two young school boys steal for him. When Sonia finds him, Sonia and Bruno spend their first night in a homeless shelter. He has been confronted by a new situation in life: fatherhood. We know from the start that he is not ready for the responsibility. What we can't tell is just how not ready he really is. He and Sonia are children themselves. There is a wonderful scene in which Bruno, having just scored some deal, blows almost all of his money on buying Sonia a windbreaker just like his. It is a gesture of pure, innocent generosity.

But Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are smart enough to counterpoint that innocence with its dark side. Later, Bruno frantically tries to sell the baby stroller that he and Sonia just bought for their infant son.

The plot of The Child rests on a single action. It is in no way violent but it is in its quiet way monstrous. The Dardenne Brothers depict it with an unrelenting attention to detail, giving us a stripped down and spare vision of “the lower depths”—the moment when a criminal impulse, revealing the worst in human nature, is revealed. We watch pure evil, in real time.

It does not last long. Shortly after, Bruno, the criminal—like Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment—becomes the subject of the evil forces he unleashed. He is now the subject of a destiny he perhaps never could and now cannot control.

The Child is one of the most spiritual films you will ever see. It reveals the deep chasm inside being, letting us stare into the depths of a soul.  It is quiet and profound.

What Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne achieve in The Son is something very unique. They have an astonishing ability to place us inside the intensity of the relationship between Sonia and Bruno. For ninety-five minutes, we exist in this world of heightened reality as the lives of the couple and the child veer toward damnation, to illumination, acceptance and a possible redemption.

Bruno and Sonia, the parents in The Child are two very ordinary people. They live in a dank, ugly Belgian town, their gray lives blending into the grayness of their surroundings. It is a monochromatic existence, stripped of color or joy, hanging with fingernails onto an illusion of happiness.

Yet, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne aren't nihilists. There is hope at the end of The Child, because suffering can purify the soul. It is a means of exorcism. The road leads to hell but then veers toward redemption. Redemption is love. Sonia, the stronger, more positive character, the mother—her name the same as that of Sonia of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment—in the end has enough love left to show Bruno  that road to redemption.

 This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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