L'Enfant (The Child)

Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

The old-fashioned baby carriage that figures in the central sequences of L'Enfant (The Child), the new movie by Belgium's Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, is the most tension-weighted pram since Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 Battleship Potemkin. 

It doesn't hurtle down a precipitous staircase in an ingeniously edited montage, yet this symbol of human frailty also signifies a social revolution. L'Enfant's simple, personal story dramatizes the decline in social behavior that has occurred in the new global economy.

Bruno (Jeremie Renier) and Sonia (Deborah Francois), a young couple that has just become parents, are thrust into adulthood without much preparation. Sonia's maternal instincts kick in, but Bruno remains a street kid. For Bruno, life is a constant hustle: He has already sublet Sonia's apartment when she returns from the maternity ward, and he keeps busy by fencing stolen goods and planning petty crimes. 

These are the children of capitalism and Coca-Cola, and their new child is the offspring of political negligence. 

That baby carriage, which Bruno uses to transport his infant son Jimmy, characterizes them both as part of a morally blank generation. (Bruno's sidekick is a red-haired preteen with a startling resemblance to Johnny Rotten.) They do not articulate their drive toward money; it is their unconscious, primary motivation. 

Bruno's a shrewd bargainer; he knows that everything in the world has a price, yet is unable to appreciate the value of anything. His decision to sell little Jimmy on the black market destroys his relationship with Sonia. “I thought we could have another,” he figures, ignorant of even his own human worth.

Continuing their naturalistic critique of contemporary Europe, the Dardennes have followed their 2004 masterpiece The Son with their most Dickensian story of brutal youth. L'Enfant has sharp, realistic detail (Bruno wastes money buying Sonia a black leather jacket to match his own, a poignant item of materialist romance), plus expressive, resonant imagery (Bruno's vivid green T-shirt symbolizes greed, Sonia's vibrant red sweater, heart). 

The Dardennes' storytelling is so highly conceptualized that their brilliant, politically conscious ideas don't need show-off technique. For instance, that baby carriage image is the stuff of social comedy without ever being silly. Through plain, atmospheric camera work and Bruno and Sonia's innocence, the Dardennes' fully demonstrate that our morality (which is our politics) originates in how we value the life of others.

The Dardennes take seriously the personal crime (betrayal) that American action films like Hostel joke about. This Dardenne approach is better but not inherently superior. Consider the way L'Enfant's themes blend with Running Scared's working-class story of desperate U.S. youth and pares it down to art-house essentials. 

See L'Enfant for its purity; appreciate its bracing sense of the actuality of the West's everyday petty theft, cruelty and stupidity. But then go to Running Scared and thank God for how Hollywood, at its phantasmagorical best, can vivify the heart of darkness.