The film, as many films do, emerged from a single image: the sight of a young woman pushing a baby stroller. If she had pushed it along as all young 1st time mothers do, gingerly, carefully, then perhaps L'enfant would never have been made: but she did not push the stroller gingerly, she pushed it almost with force, rather violently, as if no baby lay sleeping inside, as if it were empty, and yet, there indeed was a child no more than a year old in the carriage, in spite of all his mother's efforts, soundly asleep. The brothers Dardenne stopped her and politely asked to peer in at the ensconced baby, because they were 'fond of children'. And the young mother wordlessly allowed them to look at the uncannily placid infant, and when the brothers had gotten their fill, and resumed their work on the set of Le fils, the taciturn young mother jerked the stroller onward, as if it were a tremendous but unavoidable annoyance, and the child remained asleep and oblivious to all the power it vexed on her. The Dardenne brothers did not forget this image, and when they could not rid it from their minds, they decided to make a film on it. That film is L'enfant.
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Since the commencement of the 21st century, a new cinema has emerged which fuses the increasingly motivational vogue of nonfiction with the perennial methods of fiction. The death of fiction that resulted from last century's postmodern wave (and I speak here of the death of fiction in all those arts irreparably affected by multimedia integration) has killed off certain markets, or at best, committed such trenchant plastic surgery that the old idols are no longer recognizable. Television passed on from the literary & cinematic slow-burn elegance of The Twilight Zone to the fact-gorged, hi-speed technical pornography of shows like E.R. or C.S.I. (the initials on their own testify to the passing of faith from unauthenticated myth-making to ultra-authenticated scientific fiction in which acronyms replace latin roots, and encyclopedias replace bibles). The book market is an ostensible case in which a glut for biography and nonfiction and book-length newsworthy items has overtaken the augustan urges for paper wisdom; when fiction at all, our current bestsellers are of the fantastical Harry Potter-Star Wars-Batman kind (which unsurprisingly are purchased more rabidly by the sugar-cereal-eating adults who make and spend money on comic book collectibles, than by the children they raise), or of the 'controversial politik' kind - (i.e., fiction that dresses up central issues like 'the plight of Iranian women'; or the introduction of Balzac or Nabokov or whoever else is on the western humanities roster to an eastern 'repressed' country; or it could take form as a heartwarming tale of boys who flew kites in a war-torn country, only to grow up and become disillusioned and grow apart in their differing ideological stance, and then find peace by flying kites in the sky again, instead of bombs, etc. etc.) - politically charged fiction, in short, that allows for its readers to feel simultaneously informed, involved, and emotionally elated. These are the smart consumers who shop at Whole Foods, who aspire to capitalist sanity in their secular global-community collectivist faith, by being good and honest capitalists who buy organic and read books 100% backed by research and fact-checking organizations.
The arts would degenerate into a uselessness that took shape as one extreme or the other, either Harry Potter and the Eaglehead of Aztlan or the factchecked fable of a north korean girl who learned of the world outside her door when she picked up an old tattered copy of Dryden's verse translated to korean by her dead poet father (who of course perished defending the ideals of the north in the civil war, long after he gave up poetry). A crystal ball on one hand, and the newspaper in the other.
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Yet film has been able to survive the amortizing effects of the postmodern wave, and transform by virtue of its reliance on a uniquely composite technology. (It may even be asseverated that film had predated postmodernism long before the latter reached its literary apex: postmodern thought was invested in making the velocity of popular culture a philosophy - if one could reduce its stylistics to a phrase - and so it was natural that the speediest of artforms would antedate, as a time machine only could, the expression that brought it to focus: so too did life exist before it could be given testimony by the camera.) Film was a means of bringing to focus the verity of life in its directness: it is to this day an artform of the present tense.
Without having to delve into the early decades of film, when the bulk of it was still attributable to the elder master arts, it would be enough to declare that film up to now has been balanced on a synthesis of the proven methods of fiction in literature with the ineluctable advancements of the camera. In any case film has been greatly dependent upon decidedly literary standards foreign to its own capacities. Film in spurts would ever be pure film: only a few artisans - those whom we eagerly baptised masters of the form - were courageous enough to sink into and allow the thoroughly non-literary aspects of cinema to overwhelm the baser need for practical narrative. When a film was purely itself, we would recognize in its imminent frame the ontology of a singular image. Pure film, after all, was iconic: a single image was enough to substantiate a cinematic experience. So certain artists would tire of constructing vapid narratives to dress up the one image that germinated the entire vehicle: cinematic artists began to think cinematically, and they realised that the advantage of filming photographically - sans care for how the image fit into a greater story - was that it brought them in direct communion with the actual stuff of film: life, life, life.
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The Dardennes brothers did not foresee how greatly the story data would morph from the 1st time they laid eyes on the baby-stroller mother, to the time they began photography on L'enfant. The disgruntled mother eventually became Sonia, and Sonia became sympathetic: she loved and wanted her baby, eagerly, lovingly. The brothers initially desired for Sonia to search for a man, a father for her child... and then that story changed, and it was Sonia searching for the father, for Bruno, to whom the story brought its focus. Yet the image remained: the mother pushing along the baby stroller became Bruno, the father, pushing an empty carriage in which a baby once slept. In cinema the story can just as easily be meaningless, the 'facts' can change, the characters change sexes, and a baby reappear after it had disappeared seemingly for good. What is of the utmost importance is that the image remain the same, that it remain pure and 'beyond all parting'.
L'enfant is a small film, a minor film, but it works like a miracle. Its smallness of purpose - to produce an impression of a life lived according to its meagerest constraints - goes beyond socio-political savvy, past the self-importance of politically-judicious commentaries that revel in occident/orient, working-class/bourgeois, dark/light dichotomies. It will feel an insult to simply call it 'a day-in-the-life', and yet, that is essentially what it is and what it does: it does not just capture a slice of life, it builds up a rhythm that absorbs the inimitable nonexistence of our waking hours. It uses rhythmic art to enforce an urgency of life on a sedentary gazing body, as Bresson's films so flawlessly accomplish. (In this respect it is as clear that the Dardennes brothers take as their inspiration the Bressonian method, as it is clear that Aronofsky took from the Dardennes the praxis & stylistics on display in The Wrestler.) L'enfant is a flagship for the Dardennes, and the Dardennes are a flagship for the new cinema: a cinema that no longer concerns itself with the old narrative artifices, that no longer mimics documentarian facets or simulates true-to-life intensities; their cinema is a humane cinema that purely and directly and unequivocally portrays life as a means of expression, not as its result. Neither meditation nor remembrance, neither drama nor 'story', L'enfant is a film directed in the present tense.
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One more observation: the other belgian director of the new school, Bruno Dumont, achieved similar expressiveness in La vie de Jesus, after which he had fallen off the scale of acclaim in the eyes of not a few critics. One must point out 2 striking features that separate the Dardennes' work from Dumont's: the Dardennes have demonstrated greater technique in their handheld work, instilling in the viewer a variety of sensations akin to the present tense, to direct contact. It is difficult to stress how exceptionally gifted the Dardennes are in their handheld work: their handling of the camera impersonates the faculty of human attention without crudely jolting or nauseating it (as so many other inferior handheld 'artists' end up wrecking on the audience); Dumont, however, prefers single still-frame shots, and rather creates sensation through imagistic or narrative provocation. This is the 2nd attribute that not only separates the Dardennes from Dumont, but also causes some to have distaste for the latter director: Dumont is willingly provocative, and continues to lunge toward demystifying sexuality through banality. Dumont deals exclusively with the metaphysics of banality and as such risks its hazards himself. The Dardennes, conversely, do not treat of banality for its own sake, but utilize its innumerable moments of 'breathing time' to construct rhythm and emotional resonance. L'enfant is filled with countless moments of breathing time, as for instance when we find Bruno (played so vividly by the professionally non-professional Jeremie Renier) waiting in the police department to be admitted into the inspector's office: he for a few precious seconds stares off into the distance of the room, in brief contemplation of what he is about to do: confess to a crime from which he could as easily escape. The speed of the film is so brutally quick, as life too often is, that the many authentically present-tense moments of breathing space feel like eons in the consciousness of a boyish young man who still plays with sticks in the water, who behaves and acts like a child himself (the film is titled L'enfant because it plainly asks us, who is the child? And we know the answer when we ask in turn, who then do we see before us, who is being led by the camera from frame to frame, toward his catharsis?) By the time Bruno realises that he is a father for good or bad, time catches up and swallows him, as it swallows us, in an outburst of tears, of genuine, inescapable emotion.
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