Shared Darkness

The
old handle of “a young girl’s sexual awakening” is typically shorthand
code for softcore crap, but it holds factual and genuine in this
Australian import, widely regarded as the English language Emmanuelle, but in fact superior to that better known film.

Glory Annen (sorry, not Keri Russell) stars as Felicity Robinson, a
sheltered teen who surrenders her blossoming body to a world of bold
sexual adventure. It starts with some same-sex canoodling at an
all-girls Catholic boarding school in the countryside, and eventually
moves on to all sorts of exotic underground settings when Felicity goes
to Hong Kong. The odyssey includes hook-ups both scandalous and public
(a bus, movie theater, beach, etc.), and culminates in a love affair
with young Miles (John Michael Howson). It’s a legitimate journey, in
other words. Shocking, I know…

As directed by John Lamond — who also co-wrote the 1979 film with his wife — Felicity
idealizes sex, yes, but in an alluring and quite pretty way rather than
in crude or graphic fashion. The film’s nudity is copious, but the love
scenes don’t at all drag on. They’re all grounded in the story, the
galloping thrill of sexual discovery. The scenery, meanwhile, is
flat-out beautiful, with wide natural vistas of both day and nighttime,
country and city. Lamond goes the extra mile in both indulging a
location shoot with real extras of said areas, but also paying
attention to the other elements of filmmaking — artistic framing,
interesting shot selection and evocative music — that often get the
proverbial shaft in movies of this ilk. What holds this movie together,
though, is Annen, who gives a performance both fetching in the basest
sense but also psychologically rooted in the commingled implication of
shame and pleasure.

Distributor Severin’s sterling, colorfast, 1.85:1 widescreen DVD
presentation has very minimal grain, and includes both a Dolby digital
audio track and a feature-length audio chat with Lamond and Annen, who
jointly discuss in a very thoughtful and straightforward fashion their
collaboration on the film, and the state of erotic filmmaking today.
It’s also quite a shock and further delight to find out that Annen
isn’t even Australian (she was born in Ontario), and her accent in the
film is in fact another testament to her talent. For fans of classic
erotica, it indisputably doesn’t get much better than Felicity, a legitimate film that also happens to be sexy as hell. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

Brothers
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne came up shooting a variety of
documentaries about World War II and the Nazi resistance, so it’s no
surprise that their work has always had a grimy, unsparing immediacy
born of the real world. They first really burst onto the narrative
feature scene in 1996 with La Promesse, a searing social drama
about a super and his disaffected son who rent apartments to illegal
immigrants and take advantage of them in more than tacit fashion. Three
years later brought more acclaim in the form of Rosetta, a
movie that centered on a Belgian girl’s struggles with both her job and
her alcoholic mother; it picked up the top prize, the Palme D’Or, at
that year’s Cannes Film Festival.

L’Enfant continues the
brothers’ dual preoccupation with adolescence and the effects of
poverty and social-welfare rejects, pitching us deep and downward into
the life of Bruno (La Promesse’s Jérémie Renier), a down-and-out
petty thief in a small town Belgium who commands a gang of younger
hooligan pickpockets and panhandlers much like an authoritative pimp
casually directs his harem. Bruno hits rock bottom when he sells his
newborn son to a black market adoption broker, telling his devastated
girlfriend Sonia (Déborah François) that he thought they’d just have
another. Finally realizing the error of his ways, Bruno has a
humanistic awakening of sorts, setting out to try to undo his callous
deed in a manner that leads to a powerful personal transformation.

While not quite on par with either La Promesse or what might be their best work, 2002’s The Son, L’Enfant
nonetheless remains a convincing work in no small part because of its
makers impassioned compassion and ability to locate virtuousness in the
midst of despicable behavior. Their affinity for the grubby and
downtrodden could have the ability to come across as cloying and false
were it not for the Dardennes’ unsentimental, matter-of-fact style, and
an actor with whom they are so wholly on the same page as Renier, who
delivers a memorable performance.

Housed in a regular Amray case, L’Enfant is presented in
1.66:1 anamorphic widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of its
original theatrical exhibition. A slight graininess mars the transfer,
but feeds the threadbare narrative rather than detract from the
proceedings. The audio arrives courtesy of a French language Dolby
digital 5.1 track, with optional English and French subtitles. In the
disc’s only supplemental extra, the Dardennes sit for a moderate
on-camera interview for a radio program, and discuss the genesis of the
idea for the movie and the consistency of their production techniques.
For foreign-language film fans, L’Enfant is a worthwhile rental. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)