For social realism—if you’re into that sort of thing—they don’t come more dependable than the Dardenne brothers. Their last 5 films all played at Cannes and all won top prizes (including two Palmes d’Or), cementing the Belgian duo as the filmmaker laureates of Europe’s lower-middle class, even if they’ve never cracked the American market in the same way that Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar, and Wong Kar-Wai have. All of their strengths, and a few of their weaknesses, are on display in The Kid With a Bike, which won the Grand Prix (second place) at last year's Cannes Film Festival. It opens today in select cities.
It's strange to talk about story in a film like this, because so much of the film's power has less to do with plot than with character: it's the way each person feels real and flawed, and how the most potent moments feel like an ugly, unstaged moment of truth that the camera just happened to be there to catch. The center of this is a young boy whose father is unwilling and too irresponsible to take care of him, so he's passed to a state facility. He's eventually brought in by a stranger, who does her best to ease the angst he feels from abandonment.
The subject matter and tone are familiar territory for the Dardenne brothers, and indeed, The Kid With a Bike plays so much like an extension of their earlier film L’Enfant that a review of one could easily be a review of the other. My impression, there as now, is that they start strong, but go too far: they don’t trust the heartbreaking simplicity of their character’s dilemma to stand on its own, so by the end, they try to force a cinematic situation onto what would be better served by a lighter touch. The result is that it all risks crossing the line from social realism to social melodrama. Which is a regrettable fly in the ointment, since they really know how to get a performance and shoot a scene.
4 out of 5 stars.
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