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Cinema is not dead - the film business just smells funny

The popular notion that cinema is currently in a state of crisis is ridiculous. Here is a list of genuinely excellent movies that had their Milwaukee premiere in 2005: After the Day Before, Broken Flowers, Darwin's Nightmare, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Grizzly Man, I Am a Sex Addict, Junebug, Kings and Queen, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Mutual Appreciation, Nobody Knows, The Squid and the Whale, 2046, Wheel of Time.

This list of fourteen terrific movies does not include important must-sees that are one step away from greatness (Aaltra, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, A History of Violence, The Holy Girl, Last Days, The Liberace of Baghdad, Lord of War, My Little Philosopher, Oldboy, Or (Mon Tresor), Panacea, Primer, A Tout de Suite, Unknown White Male), worthwhile new work from major filmmakers (Good Morning, Night, Howl's Moving Castle, Land of the Dead, Saraband, The Weeping Meadow), at least one tremendous film that came to local videostores but not to our theatres (3-Iron), the re-release of The Passenger, high-quality films that just missed the 2005 deadline (Cache, Innocence, Keane, Match Point, The New World, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada), or potentially great movies that I haven't seen yet (The Boys of Baraka, Brothers, Head-On, Machuca, Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, The World).

Anybody reading this could easily come up with their own list of movies that aren't included in the forty-seven listed above, which proves that anyone who thinks that the past year has been a bad one for movies is either thinking in terms of business rather than art, or is basing all of their movie-going decisions around the select few titles that get the big Access Hollywood/Us Weekly/Academy Awards promotional blow-job.

The ethics of the future

Further proof that cinema is not dead is provided by L'Enfant, the new film by acclaimed writers-directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (The Son). The film is a rigorously unsentimental, intensely brutal, and seemingly very realistic look at underclass Belgian life as seen through the eyes of its starving denizens. But unlike many films that go out of their way to be rigorously unsentimental, intensely brutal, and thoroughly realistic, L'Enfant never feels sensationalistic. Where films like Irreversible or Wolf Creek mostly project their filmmakers' limp desire to impress audiences with their "boldness," pushing director sadism/audience masochism to new extremes in pursuit of some avant-macho idea of representing "the truth," L'Enfant clings to a humanistic representation of its characters and settings as if responding to a moral imperative. Considering that media representations of Belgian slum life are virtually non-existent - at least in the United States - the Dardennes' achievement could indeed be said to be a triumph of ethics as well as aesthetics.

When Lenin said that "aesthetics are the ethics of the future," was he referring to films like L'Enfant? While the idea that cinema can change society often seems ridiculous - especially in this country, where the movie that makes the most money is often automatically assumed to be the most important culturally - it is important to remember that the Dardenne brothers' Palme d'Or winner Rosetta (a great film which screened earlier this semester at the Union Theatre) sparked a new labor law known as "the Rosetta Plan," which is designed to ensure a fair minimum wage for Belgian teenagers. Rosetta's apparently unprecedented impact on Belgian politics is not just a reflection of the differences between Belgian and U.S. culture, but is also directly linked to the incredible sense of urgency that the Dardennes bring to their filmmaking.

Few documentary filmmakers have used the unsteady handheld camera technique as physically as the Dardennes do in their features. There is a sense in films like Rosetta and L'Enfant that the world must change if people ever want the camera to start shaking. Compare the aesthetics of the Dardenne brothers' films to that of the wussy faux-liberals who make blandly "award-worthy" socio-political statements like Crash and Good Night, and Good Luck, and you will get a sense of why American movies never seem to inspire social change.

First comes bread, then come morals

L'Enfant is the story of Bruno (Jeremie Renier), an underprivileged young man whose life of petty crime is irreconcilable with his newfound position as a father. Without the knowledge of his girlfriend Sonia (Deborah Francois), Bruno sells his nine-day-old son to sinister black market dealers - only a few scenes after arbitrarily buying Sonia a jacket to match his own. Bruno's casual announcement that he has sold the baby for a few hundred euros sends Sonia into shock, and sets off a series of chaotic, yet disturbingly probable, events that find Bruno in trouble with both the black market dealers and the law.

Though many of Bruno's actions are despicable, the Dardennes are more interested in exploring their characters than judging them. The filmmakers seem to know Bruno's surroundings like the back of their hands, but they do not always provide a motivation for his actions or an explanation of his relation to other characters. (This is especially true in a scene depicting the passive-aggressive hostility between Bruno and the ambiguous man living with his mother.) The Dardennes' curiosity about Bruno's life ensures that the character is never beneath contempt. It helps that Renier's performance is so vivid and lived-in, and that he looks like a man straining to hold on to his youth even though he is too old for it. Within the first five minutes of L'Enfant, it is clear that the title refers to Bruno.

Though it seems crass to call L'Enfant an exciting film, it is certainly hard to take one's eyes off of the screen, or to stop thinking about what is coming next. The film has too great an emotional impact and too great a sense of verite realism for it to qualify as an escapist action movie, but a queasy sense of exhilarating movement permeates its very structure. There is even a car chase of sorts, but the stakes are so high, and the dramatic tension so unbearable, that no one would confuse this film for Mission: Impossible 3. The spy caper will undoubtedly be in theatres for most of the summer; L'Enfant will probably last for a week or two at the Downer. Which film is more culturally important?

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