Whether or not you “like” their work, if you’ve spent any significant time this decade at film festivals (or reading the blogs that cover them), you’d be hard pressed to deny the impact that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have had on recent art cinema. With traces spottable in films as diverse as Berlinale winner About Elly, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler and Jacques Audiard’s over-praised A Prophet, the Dardenne style (handheld camera kept close, hyper-naturalistic performances, real locations, a general hard-on for brutality wrapped in the mundane) has become the dominant style of serious movies about ordinary people. This is what happens when you win two Palme D’ors in less than ten years, I guess — other filmmakers presume that you’ve cracked the code. The dirty secret, of course, is that the audience for an actual Dardenne brothers film consists almost entirely of other filmmakers and critics, and neither group has done a sufficient job of persuading that this shouldn’t be the case. This decade’s key art film phenomenon is — ironically, considering the Dardennes’ preferred subject matter — virtually completely inaccessible to any sort of audience outside of the elite circle that made it a phenomenon in the first place. If you are reading this, you are probably part of that elite. If you are not reading this, you probably hear the phrase “Belgian film about poor people” and run as fast as you can in the other direction, and frankly, I don’t blame you.

That said, the Dardennes’ follow up to the Cannes-winning L’enfant is of interest for two reasons: with a pulp kick giving way to psychological intrigue before the globo-political thesis kicks in, it’s more entertaining on a base level than “a Belgian film about poor people” has any right to be, and it reveals why the Brothers are not only worthy of emulation, but also why they do what they do so much better than their pretenders.

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