Atheist theories of redemption

I don’t know why L’Enfant has won the golden palm. That is, I do know why – because of the social issues it tackles; and also perhaps because the makers’ earlier films have been very good and did not win it, so the award was a kind of belated recognition. But I would not have awarded the film: its victory in the competition aside, it is actually a failure.

The creators explain (in the interview included in the DVD) that the film started in their minds with the image of a young woman angrily pushing a pram – as if she wanted to get rid of it. Hence the film’s initial working title was The Woman with a Pram. If so, it is telling that the film tells us next to nothing about the woman: the heroine is a blank; she hovers on the edges of the film, mostly out of the camera’s view. It is perhaps sexist of me to say so, but the problem could be that the creators are men. Some men manage to be blind to female psychology; even not to look at it – the way the hero of the film refuses to look at his son. Thus, it would be typical of this problem that The Woman with a Pram would eventually turn out to be a film about… the unwanted child’s father.

But his figure, too, is a failure. The creators say they wanted to make a film about how a father who does not want his child could change, could come to love it, become its true father. The film does not show it: in the final scene the hero and the heroine kiss and cry; but this could be because he’s ended up locked up – a tear-inducing condition, not necessarily a remaking one. Nothing explains how or why the man’s attitude to the child has changed, or even how it could. Psychologically, I felt, the film fell flat.

Aesthetically it was like the creators’ other films: indifferent, relying entirely on the story and the shooting and cutting technique for its interest. Not surprisingly perhaps: the authors claim Seraing descent; and Seraing is a hollowed out red brick post industrial failure zone (near Lille, Belgium). Growing up in Seraing one would not have had much opportunity to cultivate one’s aesthetic faculties.

It is also like their other films in dealing with human misery through redemption. (Their best film actually bears that title). Redemption in their vocabulary appears to be the theory that things can become better – we can be forgiven, we can wash away our sins, we can be saved – which means supposedly that things can get better – through heartfelt desire to change and strenuous, unceasing, single-minded work in that direction.

It is a Christian message.

Though not quite: it is an atheist message and therefore more hopeful than Christianity: the creators of L’Enfant seem to think that salvation can happen here, in this world, while Christianity was more sober in its evaluations of chances of redemption here and now: salvation’s fruits were only promised in the other world. Christianity also offered a possible (if unlikely) mechanism of redemption: the agency of God who guaranteed to save the well-meaning and hard-working. It is not certain what, in the film creators’ vision, guarantees the supposed causal link between good intentions and hard work on the one hand and the contented fruits of redemption on the other.

By contrast, both Look at me and Sequins have a Hindu message: the situation is bad and there is nothing much that we can do about it. But we can have a little beauty in our lives and it makes all the difference.