Le gamin au vélo
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (2011)
The eponymous kid, twelve-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret), has been put in care by his father, Guy (Jérémie Renier). Cyril is nearly always running somewhere – trying to escape from the care home, or heading to the apartment block in Val Potet (part of the town of Seraing in the Province of Liège). Cyril is convinced he’ll find Guy there, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. The boy’s perpetual motion is fervent but ambiguous. He’s running away from and in pursuit of something at the same time. (It’s his restlessness that makes affecting a brief shot of Cyril asleep.) The boy will not believe that his father has deserted him or made himself incommunicado or sold the bike that’s so vital to his son. In the opening scene of The Kid with a Bike, Cyril tells one of the counsellors at the care home, who’s made a call to Guy’s number and gets a ‘number unavailable’ message, that he’s dialled it wrong. When he gets to the door of his father’s apartment, Cyril keeps knocking on it even when a neighbour insists that Guy moved out a month ago. Cyril has already shown how desperately resourceful he is. Having been given the same message by the concierge over the apartment block entryphone, the boy buzzes the adjoining doctor’s surgery and tells them he fell off the bike he no longer has and hurt his leg. He is let into the block. After the irritated neighbour has sent him away from the vacant apartment, Cyril – still trying for something – goes into the surgery. His counsellors arrive (they know perfectly well where he’ll have headed) and Cyril, trying to evade capture, crashes into a woman waiting in the surgery and knocks her to the ground. He clings on to her – ‘You can hold on to me’, says the startled woman, ‘but not so tight!’ Her name is Samantha (Cécile de France); she looks to be in her mid-thirties and she’s a hairdresser. Samantha turns up at the care home a few screen minutes later: she’s tracked down Cyril’s bike and bought it off one of the kids in the neighbourhood. As Samantha drives away from the home, Cyril pedals furiously after her. He asks if he can spend weekends with her in Val Potet. It’s another way of tracking down his father.
Cyril, once he’s reunited with his bike, feels that he’s partly got Guy back too. The bike also gives the boy a new physical purchase on his quest. (The Dardenne brothers – with the help of their DoP, Alain Marcoen, and their editor, Marie-Hélène Dozo – capture easily but powerfully the intensity of Cyril’s relentless forward movement, on foot or on the bike.) He refuses to accept that his father sold the bike until he sees the proof of it – a postcard in a local shop window. On his two subsequent brief meetings with Guy, who works as a chef in a local eatery, Cyril has to accept the larger and harder truth that his father doesn’t want to see him again. Guy can’t cope with the responsibility but lack of funds is his main excuse on the first meeting with his son. Cyril gets involved with a young drug dealer (Egon Di Mateo), who calls himself Wes (after a character in the movies/computer game Resident Evil). On Wes’s instructions, Cyril commits robbery with violence. He then goes to the restaurant where Guy works to present his father – in a gesture as clueless as it’s impassioned – with the proceeds of the crime that Wes has given him. Guy rejects the money, along with Cyril.
The robbery – Cyril knocks out a newsagent (Fabrizio Rongione) and his son before taking money from the older man – is dismaying. You assume that, despite Samantha’s ardent efforts to make Cyril feel loved and wanted, he’s condemned himself to an institution for juvenile offenders – and perhaps a lifetime of crime and punishment. On the evidence of The Kid with a Bike, however, the Belgian legal system is very enlightened. The money is recovered. Samantha signs up to paying compensation, in instalments, to the newsagent and his family, for hospital bills and loss of earnings. Cyril apologises in the presence of a lawyer, and goes to live with Samantha weekdays as well as weekends. This seems too good to be true and it is. The newsagent’s son isn’t as ready as his father to accept Cyril’s apology and the damages. The three bump into each other accidentally when Cyril goes to a garage to buy some charcoal for a barbecue that Samantha is hosting that evening. The newsagent’s son chases Cyril. When Cyril climbs up a tree, the son throws stones at him. One hits the target; Cyril falls from a great height and lies on the ground – certainly unconscious, possibly dead. You fear that the Dardennes, in spite of the compelling nuance of what has gone before, are going to deliver a bleak, comfortless ending to the film. In fact, they judge this last scene as perfectly as all the rest. Cyril comes to and gets up. The newsagent tells him he should go to hospital – he must be concussed. Always inclined to disagree, Cyril says no. He gets up and back on his bike and cycles off slowly, back to Samantha’s with the bag of charcoal. He may be dazed but he knows where he’s going.
Thomas Doret’s performance as Cyril makes the acting of the youngsters in American films that I’ve recently seen – in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, let alone Hugo and We Bought a Zoo – look crude and shallow. He has a documentary realness but he’s fluently and dramatically expressive too. With the possible exception of the sequence in which Cyril goes to Wes’s place and sits playing on his PlayStation, the Dardennes in this movie are never merely observational. Cécile de France is wonderful as Samantha. This actress can clearly be glamorous but here she’s utterly natural as a still young woman whose beauty is shadowed by unexplained disappointments. Samantha is decent and determined. She also realises that Cyril is capable of changing her life in a way that her boyfriend Gilles (Laurent Caron) can’t – you get the sense he’s the latest of a series of relationships that haven’t quite worked out. The gradual tracking down of Cyril’s father means that, by the time he first appears, you’ve built up considerable interest in what he’s like. Jérémie Renier is extraordinarily good in the role. You see the weakness of Guy’s character but you also see his charm and why Cyril might idolise him. Guy is so feeble that he asks Samantha to tell Cyril he doesn’t want to see him again; the father’s cruelty is more powerful because it’s obviously the result of cowardice rather than malice aforethought but Renier doesn’t overdo Guy’s invertebracy. In this case too, the character is more impressive and fascinating for being somewhat opaque – there are no neat backstory explanations of how Samantha and Guy got to be how they are. But you don’t experience this opacity as an evasion on the Dardennes’ part.
I think foreign language movies are often unfairly and excessively praised in comparison with American ones treating the same subject but The Kid with a Bike is a genuine instance of European film-makers handling material with more subtlety and less sentimentality than would be likely in mainstream (or indie) American cinema. I didn’t like the Dardennes’ The Son and although Rosetta is in many ways strong, The Kid with a Bike seems to me a much suppler piece of cinema. The severely rationed use of music – the same bit of Beethoven virtually dividing the film into chapters – seems arty at the start but, by the end, its insistent brevity is eloquent. The Kid with a Bike may not be as poetic as the distinguished predecessors to which it evidently nods – Bicycle Thieves and The Four Hundred Blows – but it’s a very good film and a highly engaging piece of social realism.
24 March 2012
