Manohla Dargis, International Herald Tribune. 18 May, 2005. Original article here.

CANNES: When the Belgian director Jean-Pierre Dardenne was 15 years old, one of his passions, unsurprisingly, was football, specifically the great team Royal Standard de Liège (Standard for short). One day, Dardenne, who is now 54 and still lives near Liège, watched an interview on television with a star of the team, Roger Claessen. Dardenne related how the interviewer breathlessly told Claessen that he had a fabulous life ornamented with hundreds of girls. But what else, wondered the interviewer, did he do with his time? "I have a pillow book," said Claessen. "Dostoevsky."

This greatly impressed the young Dardenne, who soon found a book of Dostoevsky to use as his own pillow book. Every other student at his school did the same. By reading the Russian author, says the filmmaker, "we all hoped we'd become Roger Claessen." Dardenne's younger brother, Luc, began reading Dostoevsky as well. He counts Crime and Punishment as one of his favorites, although he quickly adds that Woody Allen's film Crimes and Misdemeanors is better yet. As it happens, Crime and Punishment significantly informs the Dardennes' latest masterful work, L'Enfant (The Child), a harrowing story about a petty thief of uncertain morality named Bruno, his girlfriend, Sonia, and their newborn son, Jimmy.

Dardenne recalled his introduction to Dostoevsky here while sitting in the suite housing Celluloid Dreams, the sales company handling The Child. Several hours earlier the film had been greeted with cheers and applause after its first press screening. Critics who have lustily booed other competition films this year exited The Child extolling its greatness.

The Child is the fifth of the Dardennes six fiction features to show at Cannes. The brothers began working in film making documentaries, concentrating on working-class matters, making the move to fiction storytelling in the late 1980s. In 1996, they made a sensationally well-received breakthrough film, La Promesse (The Promise), a moral fable delivered in the key of neo-realism about a teenager who disobeys his criminal father to help an illegal immigrant and her child. The film played in one of the festival's parallel programs, Directors' Fortnight. All the features the brothers have since directed have been shown in competition, including Rosetta, which won the Palme d'Or and an award for best actress in 1999.

The Child stars Jérémie Renier, the teenager from The Promise. Renier, now 24, will become a father soon; his co-star in the new film, a wisp of a girl named Déborah François, is 17 and still in high school. After she watched the film for the first time, says Jean-Pierre Dardenne, François expressed surprise that she could appear so childish onscreen. "We are all children," says Jean-Pierre Dardenne. "Everyone is a child in the film."

The brothers share the writing and directing credit on all their fiction films. "There's always one of us in the middle of the crew with the camera and one is with the monitor," says Jean-Pierre Dardenne. "We work together and together we develop things with the actors before the crew gets on the set. One will put himself in the place of the camera and the other will say this is a good idea, that's a good idea. It comes about organically." On the eve of their new film's first public screening, the Dardennes planned to enter the Lumière, the largest of the festival's theaters, at 1:30 a.m. to perform a technical check with their producer, the film's director of photography, and its sound mixer. Only after they had vetted sound and image would they call it a night - ready to walk the red carpet Tuesday evening for the official premiere of The Child.