Film Review #5: "The Kid With a Bike"

Will Means

Cannes Study Abroad

05/23/11

Film Review #5:

The Kid With a Bike

The Kid With a Bike was not only one of the more critically acclaimed films to debut at Cannes this year, but it was also awarded the Grand Prize for directors Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne. People called the film “real,” “dark,” and “emotional.” I, however, call it blatantly French storytelling.

The film follows a boy named Cyril (Thomas Doret), a troubled youth who has been placed in a foster home indefinitely by his father. When Cyril finally goes to track down his father for answers, workers for the foster home soon show up to retrieve him, so Cyril flees from them and clings to a female stranger (played by Cecile De France) whom he knocks to the floor in a health clinic. Taking pity upon the young boy, this woman, named Samantha, returns a lost bike to Cyril and agrees to care for him on weekends. Together they find Cyril’s father, who tells Cyril that he left him at the foster home because he can no longer care for him anymore. The hurt and wounded Cyril then begins to act out and falls in with a gang member, all while Samantha selflessly battles to do what’s best for him.

The first thing that sticks out about The Kid With a Bike is the performances. Cecile De France effortlessly delivers an effective and emotionally diverse performance. The role requires her to express happiness, confusion, fear, extreme distress, and forgiveness, amongst other things. She successfully accomplishes each one in a realistic manner. Thomas Doret is a child-actor revelation. He is smart enough to know how a child should and would be acting given such circumstances that the story provides, and he manages to convey his hurt, confusion, and rebelliousness with the skill of a well-studied adult actor.

That being said, The Kid With a Bike is quite the troubling film for me. I know I liked the film, and I know I thought it was a good film, and yet there are so many things about this film that bother me. To be quite honest, I don’t like the style of the film. Not just the Dardenne brothers’ style, but the whole French approach to it in general. As I mentioned earlier, there were so many people who saw this film and called it “real” and “true” and “heartbreaking,” and yet I couldn’t bring myself to empathize. I never felt like I was watching something that was real and true and heartbreaking, but rather I felt that I was watching a film that was trying to be real and true and heartbreaking. For me, the film never broke the emotional boundary of the screen and became a “real” experience. It always just felt like a film trying to depict something realistically. I could feel the decision making behind the camerawork, the dialogue, and the plot structure, as if the vibe of collaborative efforts was seeping out of the images on screen.

I am not by any means attacking the French style of film whatsoever. This typical style I speak of lacks beginnings, middles, and ends with climactic build-ups. French films are not about creating great rousing endings or villains who get killed off or anything you’d expect from an American summer blockbuster. Instead, they focus on capturing a mood and a feel for a time and place, whether it be the paranoid-frantic feeling of a man who’s lost his wife in The Vanishing, or the cold build-up to the loss of a friend in the WWII-era film Au Revoir Les Enfants. On most occasions, I actually find this approach to film quite effective. The style is even starting to show its influence in American films such as the recent Martha Marcy May Marlene, or any type of Sofia Coppola-fare. The problem with The Kid With a Bike was that, for me, it did not capture the mood and feel of a child struggling with life; it captured the mood and feel of some filmmakers making a film about a child struggling with life. In my opinion, the Dardennes managed to capture a mood and feel much more successfully with their previous effort, L’Enfant, a much darker story that really pulled no punches.

Call me pretentious, cynical, or just plain haughty, but I feel like The Kid With a Bike is the type of film that people say they loved and speak so highly of not because it was actually all that groundbreaking or great of a film, but because it was highly stylized in a French manner and created by men with quite a reputation in the film industry. People speak so seriously of the film when they talk about how “dark” and “sad” it was. I can agree, it is dark and sad to a certain extent. The tale of a boy being abandoned by his father and struggling to cope with it is no laughing matter, but at the same time, I also felt like the film was far too soft. Sure, it had moments as dark and shocking as the kid giving Samantha a good jab in the arm with a knife, but then it goes so soft as to have her immediately forgive him and welcome him back in her open bleeding arms, which seems rather implausible for a film that is trying to be “real.”

Compared to something like L’Enfant, The Kid With a Bike is actually quite the happy bedtime story. Whereas L’Enfant ended with a man breaking down and weeping in jail as he finally comes to terms with the scale of his horrid actions, the only consequence that we see Cyril suffer is a painful fall from a tree that leaves him unconscious for a moment. From there, he rises and, obviously humbled, tells the men who are responsible for his fall not to worry about calling an ambulance. He then walks away having learned his lesson. Now he can go and live a happy, yet scarred life with his newfound childcare provider. Supporters of the film want to argue that such subject matter is far from soft and sweet and that it is a film intended for adults, but then what is something like Walt Disney’s Pinocchio? That film tells the story of young boys falling into drinking and drugs, and as a result, they are all turned into donkeys, which seems like a much harsher punishment than falling from a tree. And yet Pinocchio is rated G. Who’s to say that none of those boys in Pinocchio were abandoned by their fathers?

I feel that a film’s worth can be measured by its ability to have an emotional impact on the viewer. In the case of L’Enfant (which was awarded the Palm d’Or in 2005), that film took a young and homeless father who was also a thief and managed to make me worry for him, and then it hit me in the chest when I saw this man who had previously showed no signs of remorse finally start breaking down in a jail. I have no idea what it is to be a young parent, let alone one who is homeless, but I was still impacted by such a story. I know what it is to be child, and even a troubled one at that, but I truthfully just didn’t feel anything during The Kid With a Bike. That’s not to say that other people won’t feel anything. Films touch people in different ways, and there is definitely an audience somewhere out there for The Kid With a Bike, as there should be. It has a good moral beneath it, it’s a saddening coming-of-age tale about the rebelliousness that can come with loss, and it’s very well made. I recognize that it was a good film. I just can’t get past the fact that I felt like it was too aware of the fact that it was a well-made film, as if during the shooting of each scene, the Dardenne’s were sitting in their directors’ chairs ribbing each other and saying, “God we kick ass at making films!”

“The Kid With a Bike”

Directors: Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne

Cast: Cecile De France, Thomas Doret, Jeremie Reiner

Distributor: Wild Bunch

Runtime: 87 minutes