Starring Jérémie Renier and Déborah Franíƒ §ois. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, April 14, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

If Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have become the most powerful award magnets at the Cannes Film Festival, it is primarily because this fraternal Belgian filmmaking duo have successfully married two theoretically incompatible ways of looking at the world: neorealism and transcendentalism. Their critiques of contemporary society are every bit as stinging as those of Cesare Zavattini's in 1940s Italy, but at the same time they are driven by a spiritual undercurrent that can't help but remind us of Robert Bresson's Jansenist passion plays.

Both tendencies are very much present in L'Enfant, the Dardenne brothers' latest reflection on the world as it currently is. Bruno (Jérémie Renier) is a debt-ridden ne'er-do-well whose eagerness to raise money without actually working for it spares no one, not even his first-born son. His emotional callousness has a devastating effect on Sonia (Déborah Franíƒ §ois), his more morally evolved partner, and seems certain to drag his youthful accomplice, Steve (Jérémie Segard), into the same compassless trough of petty crime in which Bruno wallows.

What prevents us from writing off this character as just another minor monster is his genuine cluelessness. Quite simply, Bruno doesn't get it. He is at the point where anything that can't be purchased or stolen has no value and where logos matter more than people. Because the Dardennes are so determined to eschew both sentimentality and psychology, it takes a while to respond to this movie, but we do, eventually, as soon as we realize that what we take for granted requires a huge leap of faith for this moral imbecile (an imbecility, incidentally, which is at least in part socially constructed).

The carefully composed sequence shots are pretty impressive, too, painting a townscape that seems as limited as one of Dante's circles of hell.

L'Enfant might not be particularly likable, but it is indisputably a work of art.