‘L’Enfant’ is no 10

We sat through the French-language film “L’Enfant” last Christmas night. It’s not exactly a stunning holiday feature, especially when “A Christmas Story” was available on DVR. But we’d carried the film across the country, so we decided to watch it.

You’ll see it on several critics’ top-10 lists . It won’t make mine.

“L’Enfant” was directed by the Dardenne brothers , Jean-Pierre and Luc, the Belgian filmmakers who in 1996 gave us the powerful film “La Promesse.” That earlier film explores the tensions caused by illegal immigration and the employers who exploit alien workers. In fact, “L’Enfant” stars the same actor, Jérémie Renier , who is at the heart of “La Promesse.”

There’s no question that the Dardennes know how to make a film, especially the kind that employs the long takes, location shooting, naturalistic acting and hand-held camera techniques that mark a lot of European cinema. And the film itself is documentary-like in the way it studies another societal problem: poverty and the bad behavior it brings out in people.

But the directors pose a question at the very beginning that, to my way of thinking, they never satisfactorily resolve: Can a person do something reprehensible and then, over the next 80 minutes, redeem himself?

The bad act that our protagonist, Bruno (Renier), commits involves the baby boy that his teenage girlfriend, Sonia (Déborah François), has just delivered. I won’t go further into the plot, but let’s just say that it could have been a whole lot darker.

Still, when it’s all over, the only real question concerns just who the film’s title applies to. That, of course, and why some critics have named it as one of the top 10 films of the year.