Moral maze
Olivia Glazebrook
L’Enfant (The Child) 12A, selected cinemas The Proposition 18, selected cinemas Who is ‘The Child’ of the title? Is it Jimmy, the baby newly born to Sonia and Bruno? Or is it Bruno? Bruno the delinquent, who laughs long and hard at a fart joke, kills time splashing water with a metal rod, or jumps up and down in a puddle while waiting to set up the exchange of his baby for cash. Yes, that’s right, he exchanges his baby for cash.
L’Enfant takes a look at a situation that, while not exactly everyday, is probably more commonplace than we’d like to imagine. A girl, Sonia, comes out of hospital after having had a baby boy. She carries him home to find that her boyfriend, the baby’s father, has sublet her apartment. She has nowhere to go, no money, no battery in her phone. She jumps on the back of a passing scooter, clutching Jimmy, and goes looking for her boyfriend Bruno.
Bruno’s existence is entirely hand-tomouth. He scorns the idea of a job (‘only f***ers work’) and has instead a ‘gang’ of two thieving schoolboys. He sells on what they steal, and gives them a percentage of his takings. The rent money he has collected for Sonia’s apartment has gone on a new leather jacket. The money he makes on the sale of a video camera he spends on hiring a convertible for the afternoon. He has no home, sleeping in a shack under a motorway and keeping his clothes in a bit of nearby rusty machinery.
Sonia initially maintains a pathetic optimism. She tries to interest Bruno in Jimmy, attempting to make him take his son in his arms, then later sending father and baby off together for a walk. Bruno sees the advantage of begging with a pram, and musters enough spare change for a pack of cigarettes. Then, with much the same on-the-spot approach, he makes a couple of phone calls and sets up a deal to sell his baby. He cannot understand why Sonia is so distraught. ‘We can have another,’ he tells her. His amoralism makes him a strange kind of innocent.
The Dardenne brothers won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with their previous film, Le Fils, and won again last year with L’Enfant. They tell both stories with absolute simplicity: handheld camera, no music and minimal dialogue. Their approach has the effect of making this nightmare appallingly real. We are just behind Bruno’s shoulder, watching, as he creates his pitiful downfall. One can all too easily imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth that would accompany this subject in the hands of other filmmakers. Here, such restraint makes it all the more devastating.
The Proposition could hardly be a more different kind of film, but it is superb nonetheless. We are in the Australian outback of the 1880s, where Victorian England is struggling to make an impression on a ‘godforsaken’ landscape and its abandoned inhabitants.
Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) and his simpleton brother Mikey are taken prisoner by a British officer, Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone). They are wanted for rape and murder — an innocent family has been brutally butchered. Stanley offers Charlie a proposition: Mikey’s life for the life of Arthur Burns (Danny Huston), their third brother, whom Stanley suspects is the real perpetrator. Charlie is given until Christmas, a matter of days, to bring Arthur in. If he fails, Mikey will be hanged.
The ghastly straightforwardness of the proposition itself makes a thrilling start, but the complications that follow result in a film which rivals Deliverance in terms of mounting tension. For both Charlie Burns and Captain Stanley, moral certainty is out of the question, and ‘justice’ is a hideous compromise. Even Mrs Stanley’s Victorian respectability won’t stay the course. We, in turn, struggle to negotiate an acceptable moral position.
The outback contributes a role beyond mere backdrop. Superbly photographed by Benoît Delhomme, it is beautiful and horrifying; vast and yet suffocating — ‘godforsaken’ (a word which recurs in the film) is an appropriate term. Its heat is palpable, oppressive, hellish. Likewise, Nick Cave’s music (he also wrote the script) is more than an accompaniment — it adds another voice. The buzzing of the flies becomes the scratch of violins, and the music leaps in response to the narrative.
We are offered scope, but also detail: blood is wrung from a whip; empty bottles are heaped outside an outpost bar; a corpse that nobody can be bothered to bury lies slumped in the dust; flies swarm on hats, coats and faces. Guy Pearce and Ray Winstone are distinct and watchful as the leads. In fact, only two things bugged me: why did Arthur Burns murder the Hopkins family in the first place? And why, these days, does John Hurt have to make such a big fuss with his acting?
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