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Thus, when the film suddenly explodes into a car chase, it's one of the most adrenalin-charged pursuits you've ever seen, even though it lacks the percussive soundtrack and multiple camera angles. You're on the edge of your seat because you have come to understand just how much is at stake for these characters.

You'll also be surprised at how the Dardennes' attention to detail makes someone as reckless, hard-hearted, and cruel as Bruno into a compelling, engaging character. Because they start by focusing on Sonia's trials, we quickly learn just how willingly Bruno inconveniences others. Then, when we meet him, we are astonished. He's not the devil after all; he's not calculated, malevolent, and destructive; it's more like Bruno is missing a piece and malfunctioning. It's as if morality is a concept entirely alien to him. So narrow is his perspective, in fact, that he is thunderstruck by his girlfriend's dismay after he commits an unthinkable crime. This prods us to begin asking, "Why does he behave this way?" "What is motivating him?" "What has caused him to be so insensitive?"

And when we start asking those questions, the Dardennes have us right where they want us. L'Enfant, like Le Fils and Rosetta before it, feels like an episode in an alternate version of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue. Each Decalogue episode illustrated how one of the Ten Commandments is relevant to everyday life. L'Enfant is an efficient, simple tale focusing on moral decisions and their consequences. Can Bruno make up for his mistakes? Does he even want to? What will it take to awaken his conscience?

But L'Enfant is more than just a morality play. It is an investigation of the societal forces that create such misguided people, such overgrown children. And while the filmmakers don't serve up the answers in speeches, they allow all kinds of clues to come into the frame.

Sonia has the advantage; the way she carries her baby, it's clear that she's capable of caring about someone else intimately. Bruno carries a cell phone, and he behaves like a machine—always in motion, making connections, and predictably striving toward a single purpose—money. Even when he's alone, or standing around waiting, he can't stop typing in numbers and setting up transactions, regardless of their illegality. It's only when his "power supply," his funding, gets interrupted that he's willing to compromise and feign concern for someone else.

Like the Oscar-winning Tsotsi, the presence of a baby serves to highlight the problems in the heart of his reluctant caretaker. And yet, unlike the screaming infant of Tsotsi, who seemed desperate and needy, the baby in L'Enfant is almost supernaturally quiet, and rarely seen because of his blanket cocoon. Little Jimmy's behavior may be a bit unlikely, but it's a sign of the storytellers' unwillingness to take shortcuts to our emotions. Film critic Doug Cummings has noted that the Dardennes don't want us distracted by "cuteness." They want our attention on their designated subject: Bruno, and the forces shaping him.

The Dardennes insist that they are not making "Christian films" or encouraging a "Christian interpretation." They told Sight and Sound, "We never wanted to express any thesis, Christian or otherwise—it's simply a human story: you harm someone and you try to repent. But our civilisation is so much founded on religion that it's hard to get away from it." But whatever they claim about their work, art is capable of revealing far more than an artist intends. It would be interesting to hear an agnostic explain the existence and the work of conscience and grace in these characters' hearts.

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