Recommended

That's as close to a statement of purpose as Bruno ever gets. As they have in their previous features The Son, La Promesse, and, most stringently, Rosetta, the Dardenne brothers frame their characters in terms of actions, not words. The motive behind those actions is left to the audience to decipher or sometimes invent, a task that becomes particularly daunting where Bruno is concerned.

FIRST COMES LOVE, THEN COMES MARRIAGE: Jérémie Renier with his unwanted, but valuable, child.

You see, while Bruno's off swapping a stolen video camera for a new SIM card, his girlfriend, Sonia (Déborah François), is at home taking care of their newborn son, Jimmy. Or rather, not at home, since she arrives from the hospital to find Bruno has sublet their apartment for the week. That's model parenting compared to what comes next: While Sonia is waiting in line for maternity benefits, Bruno sells their 9-day-old child to a black market dealer in exchange for a thick wad of euro notes.

It's clear that Bruno isn't ready to be a father, but that hardly explains the offhand manner in which he puts his flesh and blood up for sale. L'Enfant drops a few hints as to the origins of Bruno's pathology, notably a brief scene in which he goes to see his mother and is met at the door by a glaring man who shuts the door in his face. But, by and large, Bruno is an enigma, and designed to be so. Renier, who made his debut in La Promesse a decade ago, has since become a professional actor, but in L'Enfant, he keeps his face slack and his eyes vacant, the better to suggest the character's moral vacuum. If Jean Renoir believed that everyone has their reasons, terrible or not, the Dardennes put forth the notion that reason comes only after the act.

There are times when L'Enfant can be cold and a little bit clinical; it's hard to believe that Bruno wouldn't put a little more thought into coming up with a reason that might placate Sonia, at least something better than, "I got money for us. We can have another." It's one thing to trust an actor's physicality to convey his inner state, another to jury-rig the movie so that even those outbursts that might occur naturally are surgically excised. You half-believe Bruno when he's pressed for an explanation of his deed and he says, "I don't know—no reason."

L'Enfant treats Bruno as if he were himself a child, following his actions without expecting any underlying rationale. He's capricious to the point of psychosis, but the movie withholds judgment. At times, the Dardennes' remove is almost perverse, but it's also a humanist challenge. The pretty, sad-faced Renier is too puppy-dog cute to ever fully lose our sympathies, so it's up to us to figure out how a man who never seems to be evil can commit such horrendous acts.

It's easy to chalk the Dardennes' presentational style up to their origins as documentary filmmakers, but the seeming offhandedness of Alain Marcoen's camerawork also lets them get away with setups that would seem hopelessly contrived in a more studied context. When Bruno, after Sophie understandably flips out, makes a deal to get the baby back, he's directed to a dark underground room where he does business with a disembodied hand that pokes its way through an opening several feet above his head. The sense of dislocation is almost total, the hellish symbolism icily clear, but the Dardennes make it seem as if it all just happened. Not all of L'Enfant feels so spontaneous—in fact, its underlying plot is practically schematic, an arc of degradation and redemption that any Syd Field student would envy. But the Dardennes drape enough over their skeleton that you rarely feel the elbow in your ribs.