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Tuesday, April 24, 2012

The Kid with a Bike (2012)



We don’t know a whole lot about Cyril Catoul, except for one crucial thing: he is lost. Well, metaphorically speaking. He spends the entirety of The Kid with a Bike looking for something, but not even he is always sure what it is. Cyril’s is a situation that many children face, but I cannot imagine what life must be like for them. The film doesn’t necessarily defend the actions or attitude of its problematic main character, but it does an incredible job of bringing you into his world and making him somewhat sympathetic. Cyril is not a brat; he’s just a vulnerable child looking for some kind of direction. The Kid with a Bike is admittedly an aimless film, but the Dardennes’ style is perfectly suited to the behavior of their protagonist. The film follows Cyril’s quest to fill a gaping emotional void, and that it may have to stay empty is a possibility he wouldn’t dare to acknowledge.


The first time we see Cyril (Thomas Doret) he is on the phone attempting to make contact with his father, who is by all accounts a single man who doesn’t seem all that interested in being a father. No one is on the other end. Cyril’s father has abandoned him, even if he is not ready to admit it. He then goes on a short journey away from his boarding school and around town as he discovers the truth and eventually winds up spending weekends with his father’s old neighbor Samantha (Cécile De France). The film then follows him as he comes to terms with his new fatherless situation, and his later attempts to find a paternal figure in some potentially dangerous places. There isn’t a ton of plot to The Kid with a Bike; Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes are more interested in the mental state of their protagonist. And the psychology of such a young child is not an easy thing to decipher.

There’s some great filmmaking in The Kid with a Bike, but the whole thing is almost dangerously reliant on the performance of Doret at the center. He is called on to be somewhat grating yet sympathetic, and it’s a tall order to ask a kid to play so complex a character. The result is one of the most heartbreaking child performances I’ve seen in quite some time, and the chemistry he develops with his new parental figure De France is staggering. If their relationship wasn’t convincing, the whole thing would fall apart. This is probably the result of the Dardennes’ decision to rehearse the film with the actors on location for a month, and all the characters feel appropriately lived-in. However, this isn’t just about behavior, but just how fragile the life of a Cyril-type can be.

The Kid with a Bike could easily have been the bleakest movie of all time. For a while, that seems to be the direction it’s going. Even after he settles in with Samantha, Cyril is tempted by the option of a more exciting, dangerous lifestyle than his current situation. I don’t want to go into specifics, but it involves someone who knows a vulnerable soul when he sees one, and Cyril just about succumbs to the pressure. However, he is not the only one with power, and perhaps the most important reason the movie ends as optimistically as it does is because of the decisions Samantha makes. There are countless kids with stories like Cyril’s. They are cast aside by society and ultimately choose to carry out existences of a more unseemly sort. The Kid with a Bike argues that perhaps these stories could have happier endings if only they weren’t so quickly cast aside.

The Dardennes brothers have become one of the most acclaimed filmmaking duos on the planet, though I am ashamed to admit that I am mostly unacquainted with their work. However, The Kid with a Bike seems to be an ideal entry point; an accessible yet still complex film about a protagonist learning to cope in a less-than-ideal situation. The most conventionally dramatic moment in this movie likely happens before the first shot, and we never explicitly find out what it was. All we know when we arrive is that there is no mother in the picture, and the father is trying desperately to get out of the picture. This leaves the child drifting in the wind, and it seems all too likely that he’s going to end up drifting down the wrong path. That is, unless someone catches him on his way down.

Grade: A-

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