Innocence, poverty’s pawn

Paris —  THERE was something intriguing about the teenage mother steering a stroller up and down a street in Seraing, a disaffected industrial town in Belgium. “She was pushing the carriage in a violent fashion and we wondered, ‘Who is she? Where is she going? Where’s the father?’ ” says filmmaker Luc Dardenne.

He and his brother Jean-Pierre, known for their intimate, hyperrealistic tales of people on the margins, speculated about the girl for weeks, in one of those theoretical gossip sessions we play with passing strangers who catch our eye. She became their unlikely muse, and the notes they took as they imagined her life form the core of “The Child,” the story of Bruno, 20, a petty thief who, unable to deal with the birth of his newborn son, sells him on the black market.

The film, which opens in the U.S. March 24, won the brothers a rare second Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (the first was for “Rosetta” in 1999) and strong critical notices for its bleak and deeply humanistic depiction of underclass life.

The Dardennes grew up in Seraing and have witnessed the decline that shapes their characters -- underdog heroes they treat without sentimentality. “We spent part of our childhood there, and we saw society change,” says Jean-Pierre. When they were young, the city “was an industrial region and it was a place where there was work,” he says. “Little by little that changed, and our characters are a product of that. These are characters that didn’t exist in our youth.”

Drawn to this place, where they have filmed most of their work, they scout locations on its streets and cast nonactors who lend their films an uncanny sense of reality. The brothers resist labeling their socially conscious work as political, however. “Our films,” says Luc, “are about the society we live in today.”

Speaking from Belgium by phone, the Dardennes take polite turns answering questions, possessed of twin good humor and sociable manners. They don’t finish each other’s sentences or talk at the same time but alternate at the phone. How could they be filmmaking brothers and not once interrupt each other?

“We don’t know how to use our speakerphone!” Luc says, and Jean-Pierre laughs in the background. “So we have to pass the phone back and forth. We’re artisans. Me and my brother here only started using the Internet two months ago.”

Though Luc is often listed as producer and Jean-Pierre as director of their movies, the brothers insist they have never made such distinctions. “We work as four hands, four eyes,” says Luc. While preparing a film, they talk through the characters for months, making a list of scenes before Luc writes the first draft, which they then trade back and forth. They drive the 10 minutes from their offices in Liege to Seraing for location scouting and casting and, once on set, they take turns working with actors and technicians and manning the monitor.

The Dardennes caught international attention with their third feature film, “La Promesse,” in 1996. The father-son story about illegal workers starred a then-14-year-old Jeremie Renier in his first major screen appearance and was a breakout role for Olivier Gourmet, who won a best actor award for “Le Fils” at Cannes in 2002 and has a role in “The Child.”

Renier has since made nearly two dozen films, and he returns to the Dardennes’ fold to star as Bruno in “The Child.” “When he was 14, we didn’t say much to him; I think to direct an adolescent is always bad,” Jean-Pierre says. “We took him because we had the feeling that he could naturally find the character -- and the camera revealed a lot. Ten years later, we were afraid his technique would protect him from the work we did together. It wasn’t justified. Jeremie became again for us the boy we met at 14.”

“For ‘La Promesse,’ I was young and there were a lot of things that escaped me,” Renier says by phone from Belgium. “I had the impression that they were stealing things from me -- that I had no control. This time, they let me go very far with the character, they left me space, they followed me.”

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Forward momentum

IN an era when filmmakers feel compelled to provide facile psychological back stories to explain away the motivations of Willy Wonka or the Hulk, the Dardennes refrain from pop-psychologizing. “People like to explain a character by what happened in his childhood, which isn’t necessarily false,” says Luc. “We don’t want to say where Bruno comes from but where he’s going.”

Before shooting, they rehearse with the actors for six weeks. Says Renier: “The brothers prefer us to find the character more physically -- to find his costume, the settings, how he moves around, how he talks -- not to approach him intellectually. If you ask them about him, they say, ‘No, no ...’ They want us to become the character, not to think about the character.”

The brothers shoot in sequence, which accounts for the exquisite tension-building at work here. They shoot an average of 20 takes for each scene, one of the sole luxuries they allow themselves while making their low-budget, largely do-it-yourself films. “Our takes are pretty long, and we have to find the right rhythm,” says Jean-Pierre, “and we only find that by doing it.”

It took them three days to find the right tension for a scene in which Bruno breaks the news to his girlfriend, Sonia (18-year-old Deborah Francois), that he has sold their baby.

It’s a pivotal sequence that manages not to steal the film’s dramatic power but to fuel it. As in life, a shock happens in the blink of an eye; its consequences play out forever.

“When we frame a scene, we try to leave out a piece,” says Luc. “We construct around the empty spaces, a bit like a crime novel. There’s a lot of information that isn’t given. What’s going to happen? Will he get the baby back or not? Is he going to turn things around? Is the love of Sonia enough to make a good man of him, to make him recognize his wife and his child? We work to create moral suspense.”