The Kid with a Bike - review

A touching story of about the trials of a lost boy
Special relationship: hairdresser Samantha looks after 11-year-old Cyril at weekends after he is abandoned by his father
Derek Malcolm27 March 2012

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, co-directors from Belgium, have never made a film that hasn’t been celebrated as one of the best of its year. The Kid with a Bike is no exception. It is another lovely, moving, utterly simple rejection of what usually passes for drama in movies today.

It never shouts. There are no overly dramatic moments. It just tells us very directly about an 11-year-old boy, Cyril, who has “lost” his father and spends most of the film trying to find him, or any kind of affection. The boy is beautifully played by Thomas Doret, scurrying determinedly through a grim Belgian industrial suburb, refusing to admit what we all know — that his father (Jeremie Renier) can’t cope with his difficult life and a child as well.

Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto can be heard on the soundtrack but there’s nothing portentous about the film. It may exist as a parable about redemption but the Dardenne brothers don’t have to preach. Their work invariably exists entirely on its own merits, but within its essential simplicity lie humane and moving testimonies that somehow belie the world’s wickedness.

The redemption comes when Thomas meets Samantha (Cécile de France). He has escaped from the children’s home where his father put him, gone back to the now empty flat where the two lived and finally found the bicycle he was sure his father hadn’t sold. But then he’s caught and sent to a social services office, where he first encounters Samantha, who is a hairdresser.

“You can hold on to me if you like. But not so hard,” she says, offering to take the boy on for weekends. Slowly but surely, the two cleave together.

The movie, beautifully shot by Dardennes regular Alain Marcoen, doesn’t do what Hollywood might by linking the hairdresser with the boy’s father, thus providing a feelgood ending. But this is certainly a feelgood film in the best sense of that overused word. It gives us hope that the little boy’s obstinacy in the face of everything can engineer a triumph, without downsizing the sad nature of many lives — and proves once again what uniquely valuable film-makers the Dardenne brothers are.

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