L'Enfant

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's L'Enfant won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2005, the brothers' second Palme, the first being Rosetta in 1999. The film consolidated the Dardennes' position as the most internationally significant Belgian directorial collaboration of their generation, and one of the most distinctive sustained creative partnerships in European cinema since World War II. Jérémie Renier, in the central role, had been a child actor in the Dardennes' earlier La Promesse (1996); L'Enfant would establish him as one of the major French-Belgian leading-man careers.

Bruno (Renier) is a young man living hand-to-mouth on the streets of Liège, petty theft, low-level fencing, sustained absence of both honest income and any clear adult moral framework. His girlfriend Sonia (Déborah François, in her debut) has just given birth to their first child. The film follows what happens after Bruno makes a quick transactional decision in the absence of Sonia's knowledge, and the long, patient, finally devastating Dardenne-procedural reckoning that follows across the days that follow.

Alain Marcoen's photography (the Dardennes' regular collaborator), the absence of non-diegetic music, the long static handheld takes that have become the brothers' signature, and Renier and François's central performances combine into a film that has become a foundational reference for what European procedural-realism can achieve in handling moral subject matter. The brothers' subsequent Cannes appearances (The Silence of Lorna, Two Days, One Night, The Unknown Girl) have continued in the same broad register.