Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's L'Enfant | The Child (1996)

The Dardenne brothers' L'Enfant is again set in a bleak Seraing, Liège, with its social problems. Essentially it's a tale of (non)-working-class woe starring twenty-year-old Bruno (Jérémie Renier) and eighteen-year-old Sonia (Déborah François). Bruno gets by on petty theft, using the young schoolboy Steve (Jérémie Ségard) as his accomplice. The couple have a four-month-old baby.

Bruno clearly hasn't grown up: he plays at putting his foot in a puddle to leave a mark on a wall by seeing how far he can jump up it, murders time by playing with a stick in the water, etc. And then he decides to secretly sell the baby, until he tells Sonia what he's done, she faints and has to be rushed to hospital: cue for Bruno to return and reclaim the baby.

All the events are played out against this bleak backdrop, the film bereft of music, actions being repeated quite a lot as if to underline the grimness: desperate phone calls, waiting, making bus journeys and so on. As in Le Fils (in which Renier also stars) any physical effort, the strains and the panting, is heard.

And then the problems begin: Steve grabs an elderly woman's handbag and they whiz off on Steve's moped, although a car follows them and they're forced to hide in the water. And then a change begins to take place when Steve is frozen and Bruno goes to great pains to rub the younger boy's feet and legs: it's almost as if Bruno is at last learning to be a father.

Bruno's transformation as a responsible human being continues when Steve is arrested and Bruno turns himself in to the police, handing in the money he's stolen. And Sonia, who had formerly rejected Bruno, goes to see him in prison and they both break down crying over the futility of it all. It's hardly an upbeat ending, but it shows a strong enough element of promise that the Dardennes like to sign their films off with.