We tend to think that the closer one gets to the cup, to the hand, to the mouth whose lips are drinking, the more one will be able to feel something invisible—a dimension we want to follow and which would be otherwise less present in the film… Perhaps by filming the gesture as precisely as possible you can render apprehensible that which is not seen.
– Luc Dardenne, “Taking the Measure of Human Relationships”, Cineaste (Summer 2003)
The Dardenne brothers create a cinema of gestures and objects. From the very opening of The Kid with a Bike (Le gamin au vélo) we watch Cyril (Thomas Doret), a runt in his early teens, clutch onto a phone as he calls his estranged father, Guy (Jérémie Renier). He grips the phone close to his chest, head bent as if in a fetal position, intently awaiting his father’s voice but receives the recorded message that the line has been disconnected. As the social worker attempts to pry the phone from Cyril’s grip, Cyril bites his hand, a primal instinct surfacing as Cyril futilely attempts to preserve his connection with his father, no matter how tentative and self-deluded. This is all filmed in a medium close-up with a handheld camera, so Cyril’s every gesture unsettles the frame with his anxiety and desperation.
As Luc Dardenne suggests in the epigraph, the Dardenne brothers’ intense concentration on the material reality of objects and gestures reveals a quixotic desire to plunge so far into a reality that one can seize the ineffable, something that the medium of cinema can only approach. Jean-Pierre notes during an interview supplied as an extra on this Criterion DVD that the characters’ feelings “come out with the relationships they have with certain objects.”
Bottles, for example, play a privileged role in The Kid with a Bike. They are often used to cement Cyril’s relationship with others. When Samantha (Cécile de France), Cyril’s foster parent, drives him to see his father, she offers him a bottle of water. The camera, located in the back seat of the car, initially cuts back and forth between Cyril and Samantha sitting in front. But as Samantha offers the bottle of water, the cutting stops with the camera moving back and forth between Samantha and Cyril engaged in a playful tug-of-war for the bottle of water. The bottle’s presence breaks the isolation between both characters and suggests a bonding, revealed partly by Cyril’s smile.
Similarly, when Cyril visits his dad at the restaurant, he is offered a drink. Music at first pumps loudly over the restaurant speakers, insulating Guy from the gravity of the situation: confronting the son he abandoned months before. He can’t hear Cyril’s request for a specific drink, so he must turn off the music and thus engage more directly with Cyril. He hands Cyril some juice. They are framed awkwardly in a two-shot as they stare at each other while Cyril drinks from a small bottle, suggesting a regression taking place. This is further reinforced by Jean-Pierre and Luc’s observation during their interview on the DVD that it took them many tries to find the right-sized bottle for Cyril to drink from when meeting his dad.
Finally, when Cyril meets Wes (Egon Di Mateo), a local teenage drug dealer, he is invited back to Wes’ place to play video games and drink soda. Wes hands Cyril a Fanta, and they click cans while looking at each other in a two-shot. This bond through objects is further reinforced as Wes advises Cyril while playing a first-person shooter game. Wes’ mentoring role for Cyril becomes embodied through their mutual gameplay. Yet Wes’ suspect role as a mentor also gets exposed through his advice on how to properly kill the on-screen enemies, something that will become literalized later when Wes recruits Cyril to knock out a local newspaper vendor with a baseball bat to rob him.
Needless to say, the bike Cyril rides becomes a privileged object throughout The Kid with a Bike, too. It is both a gift from his father, and a symbol of his father’s betrayal in that Guy sells the bike without Cyril’s knowledge. Samantha initially connects with Cyril by finding his bike and returning it to him. Finally, Wes lures Cyril into his grasp by having one of his teenage cronies steal Cyril’s bike to force him to follow the thief back to Wes’ haunt in the woods.
Yet aside from all of these practical plot points that connect Cyril to others through the bike, the imagery of Cyril riding wildly throughout The Kid with a Bike becomes profoundly moving. For example, Wes abandons Cyril after his assistance in knocking out the newspaper vendor. A wad of money in hand, Cyril returns to the restaurant where his father works to offer him his share of the loot. Although it’s never mentioned, one gets the sense that Cyril’s desire to offer his father the money is his attempt to reconnect with his father, who earlier stated that he lacked the funds to be with Cyril. Guy rejects Cyril’s offer and tells him never to return. Completely lost without his literal and surrogate fathers, Cyril climbs onto his bike and rides into the night.
We watch him pedaling frantically, his red jacket blowing behind him. The ambient background noises of the night in the city play over Cyril’s image. He pedals frantically, not knowing where he is going. The image continues for over a minute. We feel Cyril’s isolation and desperation with his every move. He is alone in the world, moving but without a destination. He has become unmoored from what he knew and is at a stage of either complete disintegration or renewal. The sequence concludes by watching him return to Samantha to ask for her forgiveness and request that she adopts him.
In many ways, Cyril’s return to Samantha emphasizes how he must reject the world of men that consistently disappoints him. Guy wants to recreate a new life and feels the only way he can do so is by rejecting Cyril. Furthermore, he cannot even tell Cyril that he no longer wants to see him and attempts to force Samantha to relay this message instead, which she rejects.
Wes simply befriends Cyril to become a partner in crime that he can discard after his service is rendered. This becomes apparent in the insistence that Wes demands that Cyril take his share of the loot. By reducing their relationship to a simple financial exchange, Wes attempts to circumvent the complexities of their relationship. Even Samantha’s boyfriend stupidly vies with Cyril by giving Samantha the ultimatum: “It’s either me or him.” Samantha choses Cyril.
When Cyril questions Samantha about her desire to be with him, she simply replies, “Because you asked me.” When he further asks why she agreed, she simply states, “I don’t know.” The Kid with a Bike indicates that this not knowing is perhaps the best option since it doesn’t taint their relationship with explicit ulterior motives. They seem to enjoy one another’s presence, which is reinforced at the film’s end as Cyril finally gets Samantha on a bike. No longer a lone figure, Cyril now has a riding partner who shares the frame with him and contrasts against the imagery of the empty night of abandonment mentioned earlier.
In some ways, The Kid with a Bike is the Dardennes’ most sentimental film, not in any melodramatic sense. First of all, its use of non-diegetic music seems to soften its harsh naturalism. Jean-Pierre describes the brief musical interlude by Beethoven as “like a caress Cyril needs but doesn’t get.” The music suggests the filmmakers’ deep connection to their character and desire to nurture him in ways the film proper does not successfully offer.
Secondarily, The Kid with a Bike offers a genuine relationship between two people without all the countervailing emotions that normally plague Dardennes’ other films. Samantha is somewhat saintly here. Cyril’s continuous disobedience would most likely try any adult’s patience, but Samantha remains resolute in her decision to be with him.
The Kid with a Bike might be veering into simplistic gender stereotypes, with Samantha’s natural maternal function overriding the men’s egotistical and childish desires. But since it never explicitly states Samantha’s desire to be with Cyril, it might have little to do with her gender. Even if the story has something to do with her gender, the reasons might not be as altruistic as first appear. Perhaps Cyril has always wanted a child but could never have one. Perhaps she had a child that died. The Kid with a Bike‘s aporia, in this regard, becomes its strength in somewhat problematizing a too-easy duality between female and male figures.
Criterion, as always, provides a fantastic transfer of The Kid with a Bike and offers a series of extras comprised of interviews with the filmmakers and the two main actors, Thomas Doret and Cécile de France. The Dardenne interviews are particularly revealing since they show how much thought and labor go into making the film “not seem over directed”, as Jean-Pierre notes. It’s through this highly labored yet naturalistic filmmaking that the Dardennes approximate the deep undercurrents of emotions that undergird our every action and transform a simple bicycle into what will be one kid’s lifeline.