The Kid With A Bike
Directed by: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
With: Cécile De France, Thomas Doret and Jérémie Renier
2012
For most of the movie your heart will race as fast as the kid on his bike.
The Kid With A Bike is about an abandonment and about an encounter. The movie opens with Cyril’s breathless quest to find his dad and his bike. He cannot surrender to the fact that his dad cut all contacts with him and left him at a children’s home. His stubborn escape provokes his chance encounter with Samantha, who will eventually host him at weekends and help him track down his father. Speeding on his bike, Cyril goes from the bitter deception of his father’s rejection, to the alluring hope of being accepted by a local gangster to the final embrace of Samntha’s love and affection.
As expressed by the Directors Dardenne brothers, The Kid With A Bike is a modern, urban fairy tale in which an illusion is lost, pain is experienced and a final redemption is offered. Just as fairy tales play with the child’s emotions and fears, The Kid With A Bike successfully recreates the psychological world of a child: emotions are volatile, but overwhelming; good and evil are easily mistaken; parental love is as much desired as it is incomprehensible.
Even the bike is more than a simple attribute. It becomes the embodiment of Cyril’s temperament: restlessly searching, his desire for his dad endlessly spinning inside him. The Dardenne brothers rightly avoided pity and sentimentalism depicting a boy who is fiercely determined to find the love he needs. The bike is what allows Cyril to start his quest in town to find his dad, it is also what leads him to the gangster’s shed and finally it is how we see him spending time with Samantha on a sunny outing. In the last scene, it is on his bike that Cyril leaves the big screen...
The duo De France-Doret is a real electric match. They managed to give to their characters a subdued intensity which place them as equals in their relationship. What the pair brings to the front is the loyalty of friendship and the human respect which is at the base of this special adult/child relationship, in which both are in need for each other, but neither is dependent.
The Kid With A Bike is acutely directed. Although refusing any overtly dramatic approach, each scene pulses with emotions and tensions from its very inside. Two scenes, in particular, powerfully detach themselves from the rest of the movie for their intensity and gripping simplicity. The first one is the encounter scene between Cyril and Samantha: there could have not been a more human, unexpected and yet primordial image. The second is when Cyril plays with the water, while he waits for Samantha at the hair salon. At first sight a simple childish game, the running water which the child’s fingers try in vain to catch visually transcends the child’s feeling of powerlessness in front of the loss of his father.
The Kid With A Bike won’t let you rest, it will bring you back to the visceral, absolute emotions of childhood.
fiamma
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