L'enfant, Cannes Palme d'Or, Belgium, starring Fabrizio Rongione and Deborah Francois.
The movie has no background music from beginning to end, it is completely real scene recording, simple but very touching. The story is narrated in great detail. It seems to be flatly narrated but the filming is very clever. What attracts people to watch is not the beautiful picture, but the reality of the story.
The protagonist Bruno is a 20-year-old gangster who relies on various legal remedies or theft all day long. His girlfriend Sonia gave birth to a child for him. Bruno was not ready to be a father at all. Knowing that, he fainted and was sent to the hospital. Bruno could only exchange the money for the child, but the trafficker demanded double the loss, so Sonia ignored Bruno. Bruno was caught when he had no choice but to steal again.
At the beginning of the film, Bruno and Sonia have just had a baby. The scene where they fight and play together like two little beasts on the grass makes people feel very real and natural, as if the young parents are still childhood sweethearts. That's why the movie is called L'enfant. Bruno must also love this child, but he sold the baby without thinking too much. This behavior is completely childish. Sonia's ignoring of Bruno's prayer for forgiveness is also childish. They are obviously just helpless to enter the society. But still childish. Children always don't know the mistake before they make the first mistake. The child is not at fault, the fault is the environment, which seems to be a bit of a behaviorist argument. Perhaps what the director wants to tell us is his helplessness and sympathy for the state of people living at the bottom of the society, and at the same time fight back against the adults who committed juvenile crimes caused by indifference to children. The film features Bruno's mother, who remarries someone else and completely ignores her son's existence. There must be some kind of disharmony in the family of Steve, a 14-year-old boy who also followed Bruno to engage in some petty theft. Although the director did not explain it, why Steve, whose family was not poor, would follow Bruno to engage in illegal transactions could not help but think.
At the end of the film, Sonia visited Bruno in prison. Bruno took a sip of coffee and sobbed. Tears fell from Sonia's eyes. The two started to cry as they hugged each other face to face. When they saw this, they suddenly realized that although Bruno was a gangster, he was doing some things. The trivial things are not annoying at all, and the sympathy of the audience should be entirely due to the pitiful childishness of him.
Sonia eventually forgave Bruno, like the kids who got back together after a fight.
The truth is the easiest to touch and the most shocking. The director did not use any symphony similar to the passionate symphony in commercial films, and did not have a big scene. Instead, he won the unanimous praise of the Cannes judges in 2005 with the most simple picture and the most realistic voice, and won the child-like reality.
Heartfelt applause for the Dutton brothers.
View more about The Child reviews
