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The Belgian Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, now have a secure niche in the film world as successors to Robert Bresson. In fact, they make a direct allusion to Bresson’s “Pickpocket” towards the end of their latest picture, “The Child” (Belgium-France/Sony Pictures Classics). Like Bresson, the Dardennes make austere, uncompromising films about the redemption of underclass protagonists, usually unworthy of our concern.
Like its equally brutish predecessor, “Rosetta” (2002), which was set in a squalid trailer park, “The Child” also was awarded the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. “The Child” (or L’Enfant in French) is another spellbinding, seamy-side study of Bruno, a good-for-nothing sneak thief, and Sonia, a similarly blonde, 18-year old, who has just given birth to Bruno’s progeny–a baby boy. Bruno callously sells the infant for cash, which devastates the young mother, who turns on him and demands he retrieve their son.
As the film progresses, we realize that its titular subject is not the newborn tot, but rather Bruno’s infantilism.

In the course of the film, it dawned on me that Bruno was played by Jeremie Renier, who was the young star of the Dardennes’ breakthrough film, “The Promise” (1996). The mature Renier is so realistic as this no-account who uses schoolboys as his “fences” and callously sells his partner’s beloved tot for a wad of cash, that I thought he must be a non-professional, like the ultra-real, though impassive, “models” whom Bresson used in his pictures. Renier is as remarkable as is his equally natural co-star, Deborah Francois.

Although he returns their payment, Bruno is robbed and savagely beaten in exchange for retrieving his baby. In turn, he goes to prison to save his young fence from taking the blame for a robbery that he instigated.
At a prison visitors’ center, he is joyfully reunited with, and forgiven by, Sonia, and we comprehend that the true ‘Child’ of the piece achieves maturity and redemption. However, I found Bruno’s transcendence both facile and unconvincing.

Perhaps in response to the critics’ charge that the Dardennes are unduly serious, there is a humorous interlude in which Bruno accuses his 14-year-old confederate of emitting a smelly fart. The boy owns up to it, and blames it on his school’s wretched, luncheon sauerkraut. Stay solemn, fellas!

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I only endured an hour or so of the vile, stagey, Israeli video documentary with its cumbersome title drawn from the Old Testament, “Avenge But One of My Two Eyes” (Israel/France), thereby missing the last 3/4 hours of this repulsion. The title “Avenge, etc.” is drawn from the tale of the blinded Samson, who, if you recall the 1949 De Mille epic, brings down the house when his renewed strength (provided by hair growth for men) enables him to commit suicide, as well as knock off a host of Philistines, by pushing over a few key columns of the temple.

Suicide, by way of protest, is the reiterated theme of this unwatchable compilation of tales–principally that of the fatal revolt at Masada, the Israeli promontory, where, in 72 A.D., 900 Jews offed themselves rather than surrender to the oppressive Roman occupation force. The film’s tale-telling Israelis exist in their heroic past rather than in the ignoble present.

Understand that this subversive film condemns Israel’s monstrous, segregationist, chain-link fence, which the government keeps building in spite of its pull-out from Gaza. This high wire monstrosity prohibits decent Palestinians from access to their farms, jobs, or even a hospital for a desperately sick woman.

The irony is that the Palestinians, in despair over their long mistreatment, have adopted the suicidal policies of the stoics at Masada. (Of course, the mass suicide at Masada, unlike contemporary Palestinian suicide bombings, didn’t kill and maim innocent civilians.)
I thought that only Hany Abu-Assad, the Palestinian writer-director of the accomplished thriller, “Paradise Now,” would praise “Avenge, etc.,” because of his common political solidarity with its maker in detestation of the exclusionist fence. But I was wrong, for the Times’ Stephen Holden also lauded the film, writing that it “deepens into a politically charged reflection on suicide in Jewish myth and history.”
Mr. Holden also wrote favorably of the Festival’s most spectacular fiasco, the horrendous “Manderlay” by Lars von Trier. These curious enthusiasms suggest that Mr. Holden might be better off restricting himself to playing favorites in reviewing Manhattan cabaret acts (which is his regular beat along with gay films); or, possibly, that The Times’ new sponsorship of the Film Festival has had a deleterious effect on the veracity of its film critics.

The fearfully young and vacuously vicious Israeli soldiers are such bullies in “Avenge,” that they make the wretched, humiliated Palestinians stand on stones in the heat of the day. Israeli persecution, we are led to understand, obliges Palestinians to resort to suicide bombings as an unavailing protest against a military occupation, similar to the militant resignation of those ancient Jews high up on Masada, one of the video’s central locations.

The 49-year old writer-director-editor of “Avenge,” Avi Mograbi, has a skimpy film resume. Rather than filmmaking, he specialized in art history and philosophy–and it shows. Mr. Mograbi grabs a lot of screen time by giving us one side (that is, his unpleasant punim, center screen) dealing with an unseen, haranguing, Palestinian pal via shortwave radio. This gaseous conversation, which is barely audible, went on and on, as I departed the screening.
Not one, but three Festival films (“Avenge,” the excellent Palestinian/European “Paradise Now,” about two would-be suicide bombers, and the French short, “Be Quiet”) make persuasive protests against the exclusionist fence, which looks to be over three stories high. Do I hear any filmmaker in its favor? Of course, all three films allude to the fact that the rocky desert landscape of Israel hardly seems worth fighting over.

During my ennui at “Avenge” I recalled the founding of the Israeli state, in 1948, occasioned by the terrorist Irgun–led by a future Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin–ultimately bombing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, an act which drove the Hotel’s headquartered English militia from its Palestine Protectorate. Such repeated acts of rewarded terrorism seem to bear comparison to the vengeful acts of Palestinians who have been living in squalid refugee centers under the occupation of Jews, whose forbears survived the Nazis’ similarly squalid concentration camps. I offer this latter-day irony to filmmakers on either side of the offensive fence.

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Almost as if to atone for the crudity of the torpid “Avenge But One of My Two Eyes,” the Dutch-based Palestinian director and co-writer, Hany Abu-Assad has devised the fascinating “Paradise Now” (Netherlands, Germany, France/Warner Independent Pictures) to address the perplexity of why Palestinians would give up their young lives, loves, and families to serve as suicide bombers.

In the political thriller style of Costa-Gavras, who long ago petered out, Abu-Assad has fashioned a remarkable study of two young men, Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), who are tapped by an unnamed terrorist organization, like Hamas, to journey from Nablus, their home town on the West Bank, to detonate themselves in Tel Aviv. (In reality, both Nashef and Suliman are gifted stage actors.)

The film, which is meant to chronicle the last 48 hours of these boyhood friends’ lives, takes on a tremendous urgency when Said becomes separated from his partner on their suicide mission, and Khaled is recalled and sent out to bring him back alive, before he detonates without taking a host of Israelis with him.

The excitement of the men’s last hours, the urgent plotting, and the excellent cinematography by Antoine Heberle, make for a gripping 90 minutes. The scene of the volunteers making tendentious martyrdom videos–in the actual vault where they are currently made, according to the director–is both satiric and poignant. Abu-Assad, who was intimidated by enforcers on both sides of the conflict, was certain they were going to be closed down over this scene, which dares to poke fun at the pretentious last wishes of Palestinian martyrs.

The director-writer had the good sense to show the dead-end situation of the young men’s oppressive existence on the West Bank–working for a pittance in a car repair garage and forced, by their boss, to price gouge. Abu-Assad wisely hashed out the didactic issues against self-slaughter in an exciting car chase, which is a good way to blend a polemic with cinematic pleasure.

Hany Abu-Assad and his large crew must have led a charmed life to avoid the missile and land mines that exploded close to their Nablus locations. Such danger evidently contributed to the tension of this terrific picture. It was one of my favorites at the Festival, though Israeli protests against its subject and nationality likely denied it this year’s foreign film Oscar, which went to the South African “Tsotsi.”

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