A German couple’s joy at meeting their adoptive son in India is temporary as they learn that Kolkata’s crowded streets are an easy place to lose someone. The film becomes a cultural window into the vast gulf between a poor country and a rich one, and the way a crisis can reveal one’s values. Probably the best of the five nominees for the Oscar for best live-action short.
viewed 2/17/12 9:35 at Ritz Bourse [Oscar-nominated live-action shorts program] and reviewed 2/18/12
Showing posts with label illegal adoption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label illegal adoption. Show all posts
Friday, February 10, 2012
Friday, April 14, 2006
The Child (***1/2)
The two primary characters in this drama are a teenage girl (Déborah François) who’s just given birth, and her boyfriend (Jérémie Renier), who was not around for the event, but has managed to rent out her flat, without telling her, during her hospital stay. A petty criminal, he makes a living, but not a good one, stealing and fencing small electronics and the like. For him, everything is a commodity; the cruel decision he makes is without intention. He has not disregarded his girlfriend’s feelings, but simply not thought of them. The consequences of the decision play out in Seraing, a decaying industrial town in the French-speaking part of Belgium.
Seraing is also the hometown of the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the writing-directing team who seem to be a Belgian counterpart to the British Ken Loach, known for his social realism. The characters in this movie, unsophisticated and seemingly without ambition, are the type of people left behind in cities like Seraing. The barren (yet striking) settings the Dardennes utilize—a key sequence is set on abandoned property below a highway—are suggestive of their lives.
What’s most unusual about the film, and different from Loach’s approach, is its detached point of view. It’s as if the Dardennes simply trained their camera on these people and watched them behave. The viewer is allowed to make his own judgments, and to imagine what will happen to them after the story ends.
IMDB link
viewed on DVD 6/30/10 and reviewed 6/30/10 and 8/7/10
Seraing is also the hometown of the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the writing-directing team who seem to be a Belgian counterpart to the British Ken Loach, known for his social realism. The characters in this movie, unsophisticated and seemingly without ambition, are the type of people left behind in cities like Seraing. The barren (yet striking) settings the Dardennes utilize—a key sequence is set on abandoned property below a highway—are suggestive of their lives.
What’s most unusual about the film, and different from Loach’s approach, is its detached point of view. It’s as if the Dardennes simply trained their camera on these people and watched them behave. The viewer is allowed to make his own judgments, and to imagine what will happen to them after the story ends.
IMDB link
viewed on DVD 6/30/10 and reviewed 6/30/10 and 8/7/10
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