by SARAH ROWLAND

Belgium bros Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have more than earned their Cannes accolades with their latest feature L’Enfant—a deceivingly simple masterpiece about a young, street-entrenched couple who have very different ideas about child-rearing.

Sonia (newcomer Déborah François) has just given birth to baby Jimmy. Now all she has to do is make the child’s father Bruno (Jérémie Renier) give a rat’s ass about their newborn. But first she has to find him. So with Jimmy propped on her lap, she hitches a ride on a moped and starts a city-wide search for her AWOL boyfriend. When she eventually tracks him down, Bruno is far from the proud paps she was hoping he would be. In fact, all he sees when he looks at his son is dollar signs. That’s when it hits him: He can sell Jimmy on the black market—and if Sonia’s maternal pangs keep up, they can simply pump out another brat. He learns the hard way how wrong he is.

It would be easy to dismiss Bruno as malicious. But the Dardennes don’t judge Bruno as a deadbeat dad, so much as they explore what happens when a man-child becomes a father. For the most part, the emotionally stunted Bruno seems incapable of thinking beyond his next petty crime, yet from time to time, we see glimmers of a conscience in his darting eyes. The same goes for Sonia. Sure, she has the road-safety sense of Britney Spears, but we never see her as more than a kid with kid trying to replace whatever was missing in her own childhood. When she’s not changing nappies or standing in line for welfare, the attention-starved teen is always up for a rousing game of tag with Bruno.

The performances are unbelievably natural—to the extent that L’Enfant sometimes feels more like a Passionate Eye documentary about teen parenting than an award-winning drama. François, in particular, is a revelation. Her unaffected approach to acting combined with her ethereal beauty can only mean one thing: Julie Delpy better watch her back.

L’Enfant opens Friday, Feb 17

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