"Au Revoir Les Enfants" (1987)

The film takes off from a personal experience of the director's. During the 2nd World War, Malle attended a catholic boarding school that secretly housed jewish refugees, and if he had not exactly made friends with the boys, he never forgot the image of one of them being led away by the Gestapo to the concentration camp (this is my assumption, anyway, of how Malle conceptualized the film -- it takes a single image to set the wheel in motion). A few of the themes that adhere to Louis Malle's personal reflections as an adolescent -- the inordinate love for the Mother, the sympathetic cruelty of the Older Brother(s), the rapture for books -- crop up in this film, though in diminished form from his other films, notably Murmur of the Heart. We have, in short, Louis Malle making a private film within the greater spectacle of the 2nd World War, and particularly, within the prepackaged pathos of the Holocaust. I believe this film is popular and much loved and much seen in french classes because it indirectly alludes to the greater harsher world outside of the boarding school and the boys' still nascent reality:  the film shows tenderness, firstly, and it is 'significant,' secondly. Malle is a master of intimacy, this we know, and so it comes across as a fortunate piece of work to use the same silences and boyish revelations that make him so adept at filmed introspection, to comment, and ultimately make a statement, on the gross violence, injustice and evils of the Holocaust. As such the film is unpretentious, and therefore makes its bold points in tense but incantatory whispers. The entire set-piece involving the boarding school boys playing a kind of tag war between the blue-ribboned boys and the red-ribboned, in which Malle's alter ego (so I presume), the young, poetic-minded Julien Quentin, finds himself lost in the woods with the jewish boy, Jean Bonnet, aka Jean Kippelstein. The blues and greens of the woods in which they find themselves too deep and without a path back to the school, deepen in color, shadow, and cold, and force the boys to rely on each other, as night descends upon them, creating an atmosphere of unspoiled, inward communion. The startling encounter with the Nazi foot soldiers makes a rough contrast to the closeness and boyish fear shared by the two accidental friends: thus we are given the photo shot of the boys huddled together under a blanket, their pale faces punctured by cold, that serves as the principal cover for Criterion's dvd release.

Despite the poignancy of its scenes, the film seems to me not particularly impressive. If it is the sort of film that it takes millions of dollars and a board of high-brand talent for Hollywood to reproduce but only end up failing to make, through inevitable heavy-handedness, it too is limited to being but a model of learned tonality that sacralizes the emotional life and gives a sense of what could be a much louder, brasher, more obviously politicized film... In sum, Au Revoir Les Enfants teaches Hollywood how to make those kinds of films that it repeatedly lusts after (big everlasting politicized themes, unmistakably personalized touch, small to micro budget), but when compared to his earlier french films, it barely represents that side of him which is originary and seminal.

It is no secret that Malle ended up becoming a Hollywood-sized director, since his talents were duly noted by producers and big studios as being especially variegated and eclectic, but Au Revoir Les Enfants is notable precisely because it was his return not only to France, but to his own inner childhood. After delving wholeheartedly into the inner meaning of America and Americanism (since moving to the States in the late 70s), in such documents as God's Country and And the Pursuit of Happiness, Malle probably felt a nostalgia for his own land, his catholic upbringing, and the recursive images of his childhood. As such, the film, when compared to the ponderousness of his american work -- i.e. Atlantic City, Alamo Bay --, somehow retains the stamp of his earlier french period -- the lightness of touch, the period-specific mannerism -- as if the years he spent making films in the States had never occurred at all. The film's greatest virtue is that it feels of its time, as far removed from the year 1987 (when it was released), as the children are removed from the horrors of Auschwitz, from the war front, and from the ugliness of hardened adult hatred. It could have been made in the 1960s.
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"Thirst" (2009)

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As of late, the vampire genre has become over-polluted by trendy subpar entries, in television and film, which lamely attempt to introduce new twists or allegorical perspectives on the subject. One that comes to mind is the Twilight series, another of those abruptly lucrative franchises for which no criterion involved with posterity can explain the success of, and the True Blood television series, which appears, superficially anyway, to be as glib and gross and congested as the gleefully amoral Dexter series (which treats of the public's fascination with serial killers). Vampires continue to be hyper-eroticised beings, as they have always been, but the new fictions already mentioned tend to devolve into legitimizing them as perfectly functional, sociable beings, while neglecting the spiritual torments that have legendarily displaced the vampire out of the daylight of a hum-drum social life. If they are not beings capable of enjoying pure and platonic love with human organisms, then they are, of course, evil fantastical creatures that speak in their own elvin language and conspire in gothic castles to bring about the fall of mankind, the sort of depiction that fits in with Tolkien's romances. The more 'hip' versions deck out the vampire as an attractive goth who, though he or she manages to enjoy as many diurnal comforts as the night can simulate - such as partying with unperceptive humans or falling in love at midnight - is more concerned with fitting into secret societies or dealing with werewolves, than with dealing with the metaphysical stress that the thought of eternal damnation eventually means in the neverending end; that there isn't any sense nor hint of what damnation might feel like is what's lacking in so potentially pathetic a character. The modern day vampire, in sum, is past the gloom and doom of the 19th century. On the one hand, an advanced eros remains the natural (and positive) inclination for those creatures who are doomed to live forever, or blessed (as some might take it) to persist in and enjoy the fruits of skulking in the same undying and unblemished flesh; and on the other hand, there may grow in the night-creature a perverse longing for the sun, for mortality, for weakness even; the latter is infinitely more interesting...
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One film that has contributed enough to the vampire mythos that it has become a modern-day classic of the genre is the swedish film Let the Right One In. In the light (or dark) of that remarkable film, the feat of producing a thoroughgoing original in the genre has certainly narrowed. Here was a film that did not have to recreate the genre because it smartly illumined the oft-neglected parasitic/symbiotic nature of the vampire creature. The film used middle-aged children for its protagonists, and in so doing was able to enlarge upon the themes of the bittersweet (and sometimes violent) loss of innocence, the burgeoning of infatuation that arrives with puberty, and the disarming childishness inherent in the paradoxical aged-agelessness of vampires. (On this note, we can promiscuously surmise that Peter Pan may have been a vampire himself, seducing children to live immortally as they are, unchanging yet thriving on the mystic stuff of dreams and desires, that he may prolong his own pubescence in the company of those like himself.)

Other vampire films compared to Let the Right One In appear trite or fatigued of ideas; but Thirst is a notable film - directed by a notable director - that has respectfully carved out its own lair in the tradition of vampire films.

The actual title of this film in corean is bak-jwi, which translates to "bat", but Thirst is understandably a better replacement. Park Chan-Wook's latest film is an improvement over his last 2 films - Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay - not so much in stylisation - a technological glee contained in all his films - but in sharper thematic focus. Often a director's technical prowess will stifle his capacity for producing a concentrated work, a fault that has been coincidentally Park Chan-Wook's principal asset: his enthusiasm for the latest camera techniques, for glossy state-of-the-art cinematography, and for hyperactive edits and pacing may often induce advanced types of cognitive dissonance. If he is a preeminent master of creating atmospherics of frenzy and morbid hilarity, Park Chan-Wook does so without a care if it suits our moral distaste or elation, a strength that largely depends on the relevancy of the mayhem to the storyline.

Thirst introduces 2 offbeat twists to the genre: it advances the idea that vampirism is as much a potentially terminal disease as cancer, in that it requires constant treatment to offset, or else the 'vampire' dies; and it plays with the notion that the femme fatale is as vampiric and seductive as any vampire could be, so that a perfectly benign-looking young woman can reverse the table and end up preying on the moral and sexual inhibitions of a guilt-stricken vampire (especially on one who is - or was - a catholic priest). The 3rd twist would be that the central vampire in the film (as played by Corea's most versatile actor right now, Song Kang-Ho) happens to be that catholic priest, seduced by his own shattered inhibitions broken free by the 'disease' of vampirism. That this disease entails regret, reawakened eros, and the perennial concomitant dosage of catholic guilt, is part of the film's structural power. In any case, the idea of a catholic priest becoming a vampire would not be so intriguing if there hadn't already been a film about a priest who becomes a werewolf: to Park Chan-Wook's credit, the idea is greatly improved upon.

Thirst also boasts having quite the effective erotic sequence, in which we learn that vampires can perfectly fornicate just like humans do, and perhaps with greater relish. The young femme fatale, who initially comes across as a repressed young virgin, is played very well by Kim Ok-Vin; her transformation in the film, from innocent to predatory, carries weight and conviction. In fact, her out-and-out exultation toward the end of the film accommodates the resignation (and resolution) of the priest toward the end of the film, causing a reversal of roles and also of attitude. Their enjoyment of their illicit sexual affair (she is engaged to be married to a dolt by her controlling family, all of whom she resents deeply) is made all the more richer by the priest's secret that he is a vampire; in fact, that he is even a vampire only incidentally plays into their guilt. Since the film downplays the explicit vampirism, and emphasizes the psychological, implicit vampirism at play between the two doomed lovers (and also in their relationship to the slightly deranged, soju-swilling, card-playing family), the film captures a piece of originality in its clever genre-baiting.

The film is quite long, at least longer than what is expected from a genre-film, because its concerns are advanced and its aims are long-term, resonant. If it meanders, though it does so without losing our interest, it never fails to catch us off-guard. The ending of the film evinces once and for all Park Chan-Wook's terrific editorial capacity - on the level of the best hollywood directors - to direct a meticulous, high-brand denouement, full of pathos, sincerity, and stellar timing.
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"Blaise Pascal" (1972)

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Among Rossellini's strangest, most austere films. Why? He chose a subject of irreducibly french character, the inimitable proto-modernist, Blaise Pascal, and decided to study for it by watching those french films that moved him most. So he did: he watched Bresson, and for camera style, probably a little Dreyer. (Indeed it is unavoidable to watch Bresson without seeing Dreyer's influence as well.)

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The soundtrack, doom-ridden. The opening credits bespeak the commencement of a horror film. We are about to engage with a mind that unhappily discovered the substantial spectre of the Void. (Among his many achievements of genius, Pascal seriously took on the problematic existence of the Void, and came to the conclusion - through logical acumen and through mathematical intuition - that the Void must exist; that it is as substantial as the known, treatable & hypothetical substances of the physical world...) So the music, mood, and spirit of the film emanate from this grim, unavoidable discovery...
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The film is unrepentantly strange. In the first scene we encounter 3 musketeer-chapped men who sit at a well and pour out wine for drink. They all agree, "This is good wine!" I am unsure if this is meant to convey to us that these men are purposefully french, or that they are, despite their unassuming, kindly nature, rather too sensual for the likes of the family who arrive funereally in a carriage the next moment. We are introduced to the family of the austere Etienne Pascal: they do not drink or laze about: they are Godfearing, chaste folk who read scripture and entertain themselves with geometrical conundrums for sport. The father uses his son's mathematical genius for village book-keeping. They are provincial, but learned. In a way, the background of a quiet provincial lifestyle goes a long way to explain Pascal's atmospheric, hermetic genius: his was a devout mind that thrived in the solitude of the countryside, in the seclusion of his room, away from the glamour of Paris, a country-priest fashioned much like Georges Bernanos' tormented hero...
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Rossellini indulges in the budget allowed him for the set production: we are treated to long takes of scholarly flirtation with minutiae. (For instance, the scene in which the Counsellor is awoken by his servants, then meticulously washed and dressed, reminds us of Dreyer's [and Bresson's] still-frame meditations on manual exercise & routine performances; but the scene also serves to educate on how such domestic affairs were performed, if they were performed at all. A bigger-budgeted film with studio-dictated requirements would have quickly eschewed such deliberately dilatory scenes, since they ostensibly do nothing to further the dramatic impulse.) Other moments come to mind: when Pascal's sister, after he had fallen faint from his chronic ill health, heats her brother's bed very quickly with a device that looks like a heated iron-head rod, to warm his bed before they lift his collapsed body unto it, gives me some warmth too in watching it; the care put into these details delights me precisely because such moments are so tangential and trifling, so concerned with the daily toil and small features of everydayness back then. Television production has rarely done better than give Rossellini the money and time to film such wonderfully informative, charmingly nugatory touches...
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Humor occurs when we are favored by a fantasy dialogue carried between the lofty and worldly Descartes, and the provincial, youthful, but thoroughly poetic Pascal. Descartes' face when he looks up at us - at the camera - while listening to Pascal's dialectics of the heart's superior reasoning to the vain efforts of pure reason, creates great mirth. If this conversation ever did take place, no doubt Descartes would look like this man, and would look up that way at his colleagues, wryly, amused...
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Finally, the last scenes remind me of Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest. The young would-be curate suffers almost voluptuously the torments of solitude, the solitude so full of yearning for God that the Almighty becomes more painfully distant. Terrific pan and closeup on Pascal painfully seated by the fireplace, reading one of his final pensees:

Fire. The God of Abraham. The God of Issac. The God of Jacob. Not of the philosophers and intellectuals... the God of Jesus Christ.

Pascal is shown to us as he should always be understood: a poet of devotion and fruitful intuition, for whom science and math were but diversions from the ultimatum of the spirit.

We are induced to believe, probably correctly, that his death was due to the grossly crude and unrefined medical practices of the time, such as when a doctor who comes to visit him prescribes a paste made of mashed dog and worm to coat his calves [!?]; and further: what folly and laughter to hear the medics declare the dying Blaise on his deathbed as "perfectly in good health," though even a fool would see that visibly the moribund Pascal was in his final death throes. The final scene in which Pascal receives the Final Ablution and dies, goes back to Dreyer's religious effect, and reminds us of Bresson's terminal, but achingly aesthetic severity (per his late films). Rossellini's Pascal may not stand for a quintessential Rossellini film, but its skilled mimesis of those pastmasters is enough to warrant our attention, and would perhaps even bring a smile on Bresson's cerebral face.
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"The Age of the Medici" (1973)

Part I: Cosimo's Exile.
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If only television could be like this. Imagine Wes Anderson making a colorcoded series on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, in which the architect's constructions coincide with the milestones of his career, in vivid technicolor sets and superfluous detail. The italians had the service of Roberto Rossellini, dramatizing the 'Age of the Medici' for public television, and for the pride of florentines & tuscans everywhere. A little more than PBS' Masterpiece Theatre, a little less than Roma, città aperta, the series reconstructed the typical constraints of television by utilizing the TV's small frame to maximize the props, sets, and scenic detail which illustrate (and sufficiently condense) the spirit and material lifestyle of the time. We are treated to what we can only accept to be highly researched, accurate depictions of the streets, people, and costumes of the period. (The numerousness of the types of hats worn by the characters, for one, demonstrates the extent of the research that went into the series; the hats and costumes, the alembics, hourglasses, thick tomes, scrolls and skulls that litter the tables in every scene are sumptuous and multiple...)
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Glimpses of political comment: a shepherd, suspiciously eloquent, harangues a traveling cavalcade of bankers who are on their way to Firenze. He alludes to the decline of cultural values at the hands of banks and bankers, who devalue the art of local living, local custom, the local trades and goods that enrich and define the city-state. Trade is affected when unnecessary supermarkets are created, and surpluses that hoard and deprive the guilds of their focused mastery in certain crafts do much to strangulate the particular grandeur of the City; the specific artistry of guilds is compromised when one craftsman, apprentice, or master passes on to another city-state and divulges the age-old secrets of coat-making, carpet weaving, sword-smithing. A city starts to lose its name, its prestige, its singular fame...

This shepherd, who sports a self-carved cane, and uses his legs to carry him from region to region, over mountain pass and through valleys, may as well be Ezra Pound on his walking tour of Italy, denouncing usury and lamenting the arrival of modern warfare and displaced distant-reaching economics.
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Part II: The Power of Cosimo.

When Cosimo de Medici was exiled through the influence of the rival Albizzi family, he took away the banking relationships he had carefully put together in Florence. Resultingly, in his absence Florence suffered a slight economic decline that caused some amount of social tension, intimations of civil war, and a clamor for Medici's return by his steadfast allies.

Rosselini demonstrates the grandeur of Cosimo's return through the modesty with which he walks, unaccompanied by guards or friends, back into Florence, he its favorite everlasting son. Cosimo is the rare, perhaps impossible example of the 'Good Banker' (or so we are led to understand). The Medici bank performs international transactions, but it stays avowedly florentine: its profits and scale of power are decidedly invested in the resurgence and cementing of Florence's prestige as a city-state of culture, trade, and wealth. Cosimo, a man of humble, provident standards, wields his power behind the scenes: Florence is Oz to the foreigners who travel there, startled to find it at the head of scientific and philosophical innovation; and Cosimo is the Wizard behind the curtain, sparing a few words from time to time in private conversation with his elite cabinet of philosophers, economists, and cardinals, words that eventually sink ships, devastate foes, exile barbarians at the gates of far-off towns.

Amusingly, Rossellini outlines a typical soiree Cosimo hosts for Florence's elite, and we are charmed that instead of gossiping about celebrity outtakes, possible award nominations, and sex scandals, the partygoers quaff local organic chianti and gather around Leon Battista Alberti as he ruminates on the invention of the camera obscura with dutch diplomats and english counselors; a party no modern-day place on earth can pretend to match...

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Part III: Leon Battista Alberti

For the final piece of his lavish Age of the Medici television series, Rossellini and his crew focus on the specific contributions and philosophy of Leon Battista Alberti, papal curate and trusted adviser in Cosimo's inner circle.

We are led through... a continuity of the philosophical methods of antiquity that informed the discoveries of the modern. Leon Battista is taken by Rossellini to be the exponent of the Renaissance ideal: neither an everyman nor a factotum, Leon Battista very definably masters all those arts that are united under the aegis of the age's dominant philosophical standard: that all phenomena in the world are interconnected and indivisible; that each body or substance or force which occurs in our sphere depends on the commonality of other cohabiting bodies and substances and forces. Thus, no artist is complete unless he practice and evince competence in all the chief arts: painting, literature, sculpture, architecture, rhetoric. Above all, that art is a science; and as such, that no painter may call himself a painter, or an architect an architect, unless he comprehend and utilize the tenets of geometry, of engineering, and of perspective.

Rossellini's parable of perspective: as Leon Battista repeatedly emphasizes the supremacy of perspective in the arts, Rossellini himself speaks with his pans and zooms on the illustrious entourage who aided Cosimo...

We may understand that Rossellini's historical parable, albeit involved in the accuracy of depiction and in historical veracity, seeks to persuade us that film (even when in the narrow box of television) relies on perspective and continues the philosophical methods of antiquity lovingly recreated in these educational films. When Leon Battista Alberti sermonizes on the precedence of perspective in the arts and sciences, the camera shifts, starts to zoom on his physiognomy, then pans over to the tablature beside him that like a rudimentary powerpoint presentation limns the features of la prospettiva in action, and then sways over the room and the frescoes, graphs, sculptures, and beakers that litter the tables, the walls, the groundspace, and we understand that Alberti speaks of, presages, film too...

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"L'enfant" (2005)

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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