At last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where L’enfant won the Palme d’Or, the Belgian brother filmmakers, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, talked excitedly about their movie, in which young street hoodlum Bruno casually sells off his newborn, to the horror of the mother, his teenage girlfriend, Sonia. Just who is the title baby?
“The film is not about paternity,” said Jean-Pierre. “It’s about a character who is not really there, a lightweight character. A bit like a child. He’s never present. Sometimes, he has to decide to be present.
“During our previous film, Le fils, we were shooting several days in the city of Seraing. We saw a young woman going up and down the street with a pram, pushing it as if she wanted to get rid of the child inside. This image haunted us, and it allowed us to invent a person: the possible father.”
Luc: “Children have been abandoned forever, but selling children this way is perhaps a recent phenomenon. Bruno lives in the immediate moment. A child, Jimmy, comes along who lives in real time. Does Bruno’s love for Sonia suffice to lead him to see and hear his child? We decided that love isn’t enough.”
How do they move to the actual filming? “I write the first version of the screenplay,” said Luc. “I send it to my brother, he makes corrections, then we work together. When we get to the sixth version, we send it to a producer.”
The casting as Bruno of Jérémie Renier, who starred in their La promesse? “We found him by telephone. We didn’t think of him immediately,” admitted Jean-Pierre. Déborah François as Sonia? “We met her doing a screen test,” said Luc. “We tried a lot of young girls, she was the best.” “They put an advertisement in local papers,” François interjected. “My brother read it, I sent off a photograph. Why not?” “Being a little criminal myself,” Renier piped in, “the part wasn’t very difficult. I just walked about the streets of Seraing. As for Bruno’s mobile, I use one all the time.”
“We did a lot of rehearsals,” said Jean-Pierre. “We asked Jérémie to be free from August [in 2004] and Déborah to cut short her vacation. We rehearsed on location until mid September. It was one day that we felt that the characters were ‘there.’ They had a certain freedom, and we could work with this freedom.”
The Dardennes readily admit their influences. They acknowledge that Sonia is borrowed from the character in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. “Yes, Raskolnikov and Sonia!” said Jean-Pierre. “And [Robert] Bresson is big for us! Impressive!” “We love Bresson’s films. It’s a fact that they are important to us,” said Luc. “He’s lean. He’s dry. He’s pure.”
The casting of little Jimmy? “We always used a real baby,” said Luc, “but you can only use one for so many hours. So we had 23 babies, for all the scenes except the dangerous one on the scooter, when we had a doll from London that we nicknamed Jimmy Crash.”
