Unlike their earlier films (and as the title suggests), The Kid With a Bike focuses on a child protagonist. When we first meet tow-headed Cyril, who is 11 or 12 years old but has the gravity of a child aged beyond his years, he is living in a foster home and trying to call his father, who has moved and left no forwarding address. As children who look up to their parents are wont to do, Cyril refuses to believe that his father could have abandoned him, and he rejects (sometimes violently) any attempt by the adults around him to convince him otherwise. When he runs away from the foster home and tries to track down his father, his path crosses with Samantha, a hairdresser who is oddly and somewhat inexplicably sympathetic to his plight. When he latches onto her in a medical office waiting room in an attempt to keep the foster home counselors from taking him back, she tells him gently in a bit of prescient emotional foreshadowing, “You can hold onto me, just not so tight.”

Samantha ends up adopting Cyril on the weekends and helps him track down his dad (Jérémie Renier), who they eventually find working as a cook and trying to start a new life. (As is typical with the Dardenne brothers’ films, little if any backstory is supplied, so we are left to fill in the blanks as to why Cyril’s dad is so desperate to ditch him and start over, not to mention the whereabouts of his mother. The whole time I was watching the film, I was imagining it as a kind of sequel to L’Enfant, in which Renier played a small-time thief who sells his newborn son on the black market and then frantically tries to get him back.) Cyril is so desperate for a father figure in his life that he is willing to overlook the ugly truths about the way his father has treated him, including the symbolic selling of his beloved bicycle, which Samantha, in an equally symbolic gesture, tracks down and buys back for him (the centrality of the bicycle, both literally and figuratively, seems to be a purposeful allusion to Vittorio de Sica’s neorealist masterwork Bicycle Thieves, to which the Dardennes’ films are often compared).

Cyril’s desire for a male figure to look up to leads him into a relationship with Wes (Egon Di Mateo), the greasy leader of a local teenage gang who befriends Cyril by drawing him into his confidence and treating him to PlayStation games, soda, and the cool-sounding nickname “Pitbull,” which he bestows on Cyril to compliment his tenacity and willingness to fight for what’s his (they first meet when one of Wes’s underlings steals Cyril’s bike and the boy chases him down and tackles him for it). It is obvious from the start that Wes, despite his protestations about being unfairly labeled in his neighborhood as a drug dealer, has nothing but the worst intentions for Cyril, but the boy’s youth, naïveté, and desperation for some kind of father, literal or symbolic, blinds him to the realities around him and takes him down a path from which he might not return.

As in L’Enfant and Lorna’s Silence, we fear greatly for Cyril’s future and feel for him even as he acts terribly, lashing out against those who are trying to care for him and latching onto those who would hurt him. There is a particularly painful sequence in which Samantha tries to stop him from going out one night, knowing that he is headed for bad deeds with Wes, and Cyril fights her off with a desperate physicality that is difficult to watch. The Dardennes have proved in their previous films that they are amazing actor’s directors, and in The Kid With a Bike they demonstrate a fluency with child actors comparable to that of Truffaut and Spielberg. Thomas Doret, a complete unknown, is utterly convincing as Cyril, a gangly kid who could, with only a slight nudge, head down an exceedingly dark path. Yet, he has such an open face and a genuineness about him that we root for him, even when he’s at his worst; the Dardennes’ innate humanism ensures that we recognize his actions as despairing cries for help, rather than simply selfish violence.

Similarly, Cécile De France makes Samantha into a sympathetic soul whose willingness to endure Cyril’s abuse is admirable, rather than questionable. When Cyril asks her at one point why she agreed to take him on weekends, she honestly doesn’t have an answer, yet she doesn’t necessarily need to provide one. The Kid With a Bike is not about simple answers, but rather about messy truths, and how you view the film’s final moments, as either an implausible bit of plot manipulation or a deeply moving symbolic resurrection and testament to love’s abiding power, will say much about how effective the film has been.

Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick

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