L'enfant - The Chold (12A)
- Consumer Advice: Contains strong language and moderate violence
- Run time: 1 hour 40 mins
- Language: French
- Genre: Drama
- Release date: 1st January 2005
- Starring: Jeremie Renier, Deborah Francois, Jeremie Segard
- Directed by: Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne
- Distributor: Artificial Eye
Plot Synopsis
With this, their second Cannes Palme d'Or winner, the Dardenne brothers again explore life on the margins in unglamorous Liège, proving that it's possible to create a film that's wholly in keeping with its predecessors yet perfectly fresh. Jérémie Renier (the son in La Promesse) plays Bruno, a 20-year-old happily living a hand-to-mouth existence funded by goods stolen by the schoolkids in his gang and by benefits paid out to his 18-year-old girlfriend Sonja (Déborah François) - who, as the film begins, has just hours before given birth to their child. Though almost as reckless as Bruno, she's unprepared for his cavalier attitude towards parenthood: unbeknown to her, he arranges, in return for easy money, for the baby to be illegally adopted... Though the film - less stylistically austere than Rosetta and The Son - never pulls its punches, it's far from despairing; such is the Dardennes' unsentimental compassion for these characters that an ending of almost sublime grace and quite devastating emotional power is assured. En route, they provide a wonderfully evocative account of life on the streets: their astute, detailed observations served by performances of enormous subtlety and conviction. Most remarkable of all, a heart-stopping chase sequence - since firmly grounded in social, psychological and emotional reality - is far more suspenseful than any number of Hollywood action-scenes.