The Dardenne brothers of Belgium, Jean-Pierre and Luc, have become dependable providers of coarse-grained slices of lower-class life, thicker in credibility than in captivation, but still thicker than most films in both. The title of this one, which translates as The Child, would seem to refer not so much to the illegitimate blue-bundled newborn as to his callow young father (Jérémie Renier, the juvenile lead in the Dardennes' La Promesse ten years earlier, and a player in their Rosetta and The Son in the interim), a panhandler, a petty thief, a sometime street person ("Only fuckers work") whose outstanding trait is his short-sightedness. His girlfriend's stay in the maternity ward proves to have been a golden opportunity for him to sublet their apartment to total strangers, and never mind when mother and baby come home. (We find this out in step with the bewildered girlfriend, the screen debut of Déborah François, who, typical of a Dardenne discovery, scarcely appears to be acting, simply being.) The young couple smooth out this first bump, and although there is no evidence of a deep connection between them, their animalistic roughhousing, their romping in the open air, their tussle over control of the car radio (the intolerable, to him, Blue Danube waltz is the only music in the movie), paint a family portrait of chimplike contentment. The next bump is bigger. Entrusted to take the baby for a solo stroll in the park, the new father gets the bright idea of selling the infant on the black market (ever the child, ever the chimp, he busies himself, while waiting to be disburdened of his son, making muddy footprints on a convenient wall), and he neglects to anticipate the mother's reaction until he next sees her: "I thought we'd have another." This turn of events would be shocking if not for the Dardennes' sublime ability (shared with their eminent compatriot, Georges Simenon) to remain unshocked by anything human. To find the principal character animalistic, not just in his idea of fun (carving ripples in the river with a handy metal rod) but also in his freedom from introspection, is not to find him subhuman. It is merely, and fearlessly, to broaden the view of the human spectrum. Watching him smooth out this bigger bump calls upon the sorts of emotions aroused by the broken-winged bird and the three-legged dog. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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