The haunting Belgian drama L'Enfant recalls other timeless films about human desperation: Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, about a neglected French schoolboy, and Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, about a father driven to commit a crime to escape poverty.
Like those films, L'Enfant's greatest triumph is inserting viewers into the hopelessness and desperate scramble to survive that define the lives of its characters -- who are young, poor, homeless residents of the bleak Belgian steel town of Seraing. L'Enfant, which received the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or in 2005, is a glimpse into lives defined by the kind of quotidian despair that has settled so deeply into its characters's bones, it has become second nature.
