Sunday, March 26, 2006

L'Enfant

Dardenne brothers' L'Enfant, which won the Golden Palm this year at the Cannes film festival, is finally getting released here. NYT has a fantastic review of the film , specially this paragraph:

Why make a film about Bruno? The same might be asked about Raskolnikov. Like Robert Bresson, whose "Pickpocket" informs "L'Enfant" and is itself a loose reworking of "Crime and Punishment", the Dardennes are not interested in passing judgment on a grievously flawed character; that's why God and Hollywood were invented. Since there is no moral ambiguity in the act of selling another human being, there would be no point in such judgment, other than to indulge in some self-satisfied finger-wagging. Rather, what interests the Dardennes — what invests their work with such terrific urgency — is not only how Bruno became the kind of man who would sell a child as casually as a slab of beef, but also whether a man like this, having committed such a repellent offense, can find redemption.

The R-word (not "repellent", the other one) generally makes me a little queasy but I know it worked in Pickpocket and I hope it works in this film too. Dardenne Brothers' Rosetta has been long on my to-see list but so far I haven't seen any film by them.

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