My Lost Decade #12 — The Kid With A Bike (2011)
Like many film nerds, I took the coming of a new decade as an excuse to list my top100 favourite films of the 2010’s. While writing it, I kept noticing how many films I had missed out on. Rather than binging frantically in the last weeks of the decade, I then decided to start a new project: in 2020, I would watch 100 movies from the past ten years that I’d never seen before — because they passed me by, because I was too lazy to get to the cinema, because something trivial turned me off. I would also annotate the experience on this here medium blog. So here we go, 100 films from the last decade, viewed roughly in chronological order.
The Kid With A Bike by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne
At The Time: I think it was vaguely on my radar, but I can’t say I was much interested. I have a bias against miserabilism — obviously movies like “The Kid On A Bike” aren’t supposed to be pleasurable in a straightforward manner, but I also feel like there’s a certain manipulativeness at play with their critical standing, a sense that if you choose grim enough subject matter you don’t actually have to be creative beyond that.
Now: Yeah, I’m not particularly looking forward to this one. But for every film that confirms my prejudices there’s a Shoplifters or Ash Is The Purest White that shows me how wrong headed they can be. About time I give the Dardennes a go, at least.
When we meet our protagonist Cyril (Thomas Doret), he is trying to escape an orphanage, in search of his father and of the bike he gave him. Everything in the adult world tells him to quit, but the kid is relentless — he wants to reunite with his da and anything that doesn’t help with that is a distraction he has no time for.
Doret’s performance is truly remarkable — he captures an aggressive sort of wiry intensity and desperation that feels very truthful. But The Kid With A Bike keeps a distance from its main character — we know his search is fruitless, not only because of all the rational adult reasons we have to believe that but also because the very desperation he brings to the task makes it seem like a dead end. One cannot expect a child to accept something as monstrous as being abandoned by their own father, but as grown-ups, our defenses tend to centre around seemingly accepting reality and finding ways to compartimentalize or rationalize it until it seems somehow bearable; Cyril’s more direct approach of absolute denial creates a gulf between him and the viewer, to the extent that when we finally meet his deadbeat father I was surprised to find out Cyril had actually been given some straws to clutch at, his father having told him that the orphanage would be “only for a month”.
The one positive force in his life appears in the form of Samantha (Cécile de France), a stranger whom he grabs in a bid not to get taken back and who, in a gesture of it has to be said immense generosity, agrees to become his foster mother. It is Samantha who buys back the bike his dad had sold off; Samantha who arranges a meeting with the father, and forces him to come clean; Samantha who tries to offer the child a loving home. Cyril, understandably upset, acts out in various ways, mostly by befriending petty criminal Wes (Egon Di Mateu). This, again, highlights the distant approach the film takes: Samantha is portrayed as loving, patient and warm, while Wes is introduced as one of a group of older kids who’ve egged a boy on to steal Cyril’s bike in order to watch them fight — everything about him screams dirtbag. A pat pop-psychoanalitical interpretation would hold that, having been raised by one fuck up, Cyril is seeking out another in search of a father figure. Contrast this with friendly neighbourhood kid Mourad (Youssef Tiberkanine), who consistently gets the cold shoulder.
The Kid With A Bike is an upsetting film, to be sure. We feel for Cyril even if we don’t identify with him and might even feel exasperated by his stubbornness. It’s impossible not to be affected by, say, the opening scene where he gets tackled by two counsellors, even though it transpires they have only good intentions. Or when he’s self-harming in the car after being told by his father that he doesn’t want to see him anymore. All these moments are played in a naturalistic manner, save for one truly bizarre stylistic decision — a schmaltzy orchestral swell that emerges every now and then (in a film otherwise devoid of soundtrack), almost as if it’s highlighting that you’ve just seen a truly horrible moment in a film full of unpleasant ones. It’s the only touch of formal creativity in a movie that otherwise hews very close to the old neo-realist handbook; it also feels out of place in a way that undercuts the emotions of the scene without commenting on them in any valuable manner.
So yeah, overall this is pretty much what I expected. I’ll give the film credit for swerving away from the cheap nihilistic ending it at one point seems hellbent on, and it’s certainly carefully crafted. But I don’t know if it will stay with me.
Signs it was made in 2011:Wes has a PS3 with the new Assassin’s Creed; Mourad is psyched to go see a film in 3D.
