On the Big Screen: THE KID WITH A BIKE (Le Gamin au Velo, 2011)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne make a certain kind of movie, but it's the kind of movie you don't often see in American multiplexes and the Belgian brothers do it well enough that it's worth seeing what they'll do next. After catching up with some of their work on DVD, I decided to see their newest effort on the big screen even though the Dardennes are arguably the opposite of spectacle makers. They're lean naturalists concerned with low life at or near the fringes of society. Their interest is sympathetic rather than exploitative and the results look and feel authentic. I get a better sense of being in another world from their pictures than from many CGI fantasies, and even their small-scale studies are meant to breathe on as large a screen as possible. You can appreciate the way they choreograph action within long-take space better on a big screen. There's a scene in this movie where the kid, Cyril (Thomas Doret), is reunited with his bike and rides it in dangerous proximity to his benefactress's car, after impressing her with some wheelies, as she backs up and pulls out of the courtyard of Cyril's youth home, all in one take. It all looks authentically risky for the boy and the woman driving the car, yet it must have been staged to seem characteristically impulsive for Cyril. While some directors specialize in beautiful framing and the stuff of screen captures, the Dardennes excel in staging action within the frame and focusing our attention on the key details. That's naturalism, I guess -- or neorealism -- and done right it's as much of a feast for the eye as any kind of filmmaking.

This time around the Dardennes have come up with a story that feels especially archetypal; it's likely to evoke many an earlier film depending on who's watching. Cyril's in the youth home because his father was temporarily unable to take care of him. Dad promised to come back for him soon, but Cyril has grown impatient and obsessed. He wants his Dad and he wants his bike. He escapes from the youth home and sneaks into Dad's old apartment building, despite being told that Dad had moved out. Chased by his caretakers, he seeks shelter in a clinic waiting room in the same building, clinging to the legs of a patient, Samantha (Cecile De France), from the same neighborhood. She's surprisingly compassionate. You can hold on, she says, only not so hard. After he's pried off, she takes an interest in the boy and the bike. She's the one who presents it to him, explaining that she bought it from someone to whom Dad had sold it. Cyril won't believe that story; the bike had to have been stolen -- Dad wouldn't sell his boy's bike like that. But he ultimately finds proof that Dad had done just that, and sold off his own motorcycle, too. Suddenly, Cyril latches on to Samantha again, asking if he can stay with her on weekends. She agrees, and helps him track down his Dad, who now has a kitchen-prep job in a restaurant. Keeping the focus on Cyril, the Dardennes don't show us Samantha's first meeting with Dad, saving for Cyril and us together the big, yet inevitable reveal that Dad is some Guy played by Jeremie Renier -- the actor who more nearly embodies the brothers' work than anyone else and serves for them as an icon of feckless, pathetic masculinity. Father and son have an uncomfortable reunion in the restaurant kitchen; Dad seems in a hurry to be rid of the boy. Breaking focus on Cyril, we now see a private chat between Guy and Samantha, in which the father explains that looking after the boy is too stressful for him and asks Samantha to make sure the kid never visits him again. After learning from Cyril that Guy had promised to at least call him next weekend, she takes the boy back to the restaurant and compels Dad to tell him what he told her.

The paternal rejection is temporarily shattering but Cyril seems to recover quickly. He shows interest in playing with other kids for the first time in the picture, but his yearning for a father figure soon reasserts itself as he falls under the influence of the neighborhood drug dealer. Professing to admire Cyril's courage after one of his stoogest tried to steal the bike, the dealer dubs the boy "Pitbull" and invites him to his home (his grandma's, actually) to play Assassin's Creed. He's really looking for a fresh face to do a mugging for him, but Cyril's almost pathological urge to bond with an older man puts him at violent odds with Samantha and in danger of jail or worse when the mugging by baseball bat of a news dealer and his son doesn't go exactly as planned....

Some reviewers have compared Le Gamin with Vittorio De Sica's neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves, but the similarities between those films seem superficial to me. The film reminded me more of one French movie and one American film. The French film is Robert Bresson's Mouchette, the story of a sullen girl with an unloving father that addresses the possibility of grace for the unwanted and put upon. Cyril strikes me as a sort of male Mouchette, and the ending of Le Gamin strikes me as a counterpoint to the close of the Bresson film, down to the closing burst of classical music. Unexpectedly, the film Le Gamin most reminded me of was Arthur Penn's The Miracle Worker. Cyril's world so entirely revolved around his dad that Dad's absence plunged him into a sort of autistic void from which Samantha attempts to rescue him. Cyril's frantic flailing about, climaxing in a salon scuffle during which he stabs Samantha, reminded me of Helen Keller's violent tantrums in Miracle Worker. To be honest, an earlier scene in Samantha's salon in which Cyril compulsively scrubbed his hands in her faucet despite her insistence that he not waste water triggered the comparison for me. The way the film developed, I thought it would be a Miracle Worker without a miracle, but ... to say more would spoil things but see my comparison to Mouchette for those in the know. Compared to Annie Sullivan, Samantha's motives are kept deliberately obscure here, but Cyril clearly fills a profound void in her life. Forced to choose between the boy and a boyfriend after an argument, Samantha chooses Cyril. Even after Cyril stabs her -- it's little more than a nick, really -- she breaks down in tears at the thought of reporting him to the authorities. If she seems saintly, the impression is probably deliberate. The Kid With a Bike is essentially a sentimental story about the potential of persistent goodness, but it's no tearjerker. It seems almost Spielbergian in its vindication of matriarchy and goes beyond Spielberg in suggesting that Cyril is better off without a father figure, given the options in his milieu, but the Dardennes pull this off while appearing to remain clear-eyed and unsentimental. They don't manipulate the emotions in blatant Hollywood ways but theirs is the sort of story an older Hollywood would recognize. That's not a criticism, but it is a warning that the story might seem to belie the brothers' naturalist pretensions. But if you take Le Gamin as a kind of modern fairy tale or parable, albeit redeemed by its relevance, you should be able to appreciate it on its own terms as an outstanding film.

LORNA'S SILENCE (2008)

These days people are pretty desperate to live in Belgium. I suppose it depends on where you start life. Lorna, for instance, is an Albanian -- from the country, not the city in New York where I live. Some of us Albanians might want to move to Belgium, too, but Lorna's the one with the system. To be more accurate, she's a cog in the system. Here's how it works. The local mafia makes a deal with a native Belgian, paying him to marry Lorna. They stay married long enough to not look suspicious, then they break up. By then, Lorna has a Belgian passport. Now she can marry some guy from the east and get him Belgian citizenship. Pretty efficient.

The complication, in this particular case, is what to do with the first husband, the Belgian. Lorna has married Claudy Moreau, known to most of her associates as "the junky." And that about sums it up -- except that he's trying to kick the habit. A deep, aching emotional neediness emerges as he embarks upon the ordeal. While Lorna prefers to deal with her husband on a purely transactional basis, he desperately needs her to be near him, to talk to or play cards with. She's the one constant in his life, someone he can set goals around to structure his time and keep his mind off the junk. But she'd rather keep her distance. It's a marriage in name only, of course; Claudy sleeps in the living room on a mattress Lorna keeps stuck between her mattresses during the day. She resents his neediness, especially when it means calling her home from her laundry job on some feeble pretext or another. But despite all the annoyances and her desire to hook up eventually with her Albanian boyfriend Sokol, she can't help pitying Claudy, especially when she realizes that the people who placed her with him specifically matched her with a junky because it'd be easy to make her a widow by arranging an overdose. His resolution to clean up complicates their plans, especially since Lorna's next husband, "the Russian," is on his way to Belgium. They want to be rid of Claudy as soon as possible, but Lorna would rather he didn't die.

So she tries to arrange a divorce to let Claudy can get away clean, even though her handlers claim that a quickie divorce would look suspicious. Her idea is to claim abuse and to get Claudy to hit her. But as she's discovered compassion, he's discovered honor. He doesn't want to go on public record as a violent case. Lorna thinks he owes it to her to clobber her because she stood by him during his withdrawal, but the best he can manage is a tepid slap. She has to bruise herself and bash her head against a wall to make it more convincing. The irony of the situation is that she's trying to save his life, but he feels that she's abandoning him, and that drives him to the brink of falling off the wagon. Lorna realizes suddenly that she can't let that happen. Her solution is to offer herself, naked, to him, abruptly redeeming their parody of a marriage.

This is probably the happiest moment for our main charcters, but things change fast.

This takes us to the halfway point of Le Silence de Lorna, but it becomes hard to describe it further without diluting the shock value of subsequent story twists. But I think I've described enough to get fans of crime cinema interested. This is definitely a crime movie, but of a subset that might be described as lowlife pathos, dealing with the desperate struggles and sorrows of the little people at the bottom of the food chain. It's a mode the Dardenne brothers have worked in before, particularly in the only other film of theirs that I've seen, The Child. They practice a kind of ragamuffin romanticism in naturalistic style and have won awards doing so. Their films (co-written and co-directed) look lived-in rather than art-directed, which is entirely right for their subject matter. In tone they're the opposite of hard-boiled. I call theirs crime films but they're not gangster movies and have nothing to do with fantasies of power or violence. The Dardennes do crime movies, I suppose, because crime is what the people at the bottom are reduced to. But they're an exception to the generic rule because compassion rather than cynicism is their object.

In Lorna's Silence the Dardennes have teamed a genuine Albanian actress of limited experience, Arta Dobroshi, with one of their favorite actors, Jeremie Renier. While their sudden burst of sexual passion is really a little hard to believe, the two performers do have a chemistry that makes the characters' evolving relationship emotionally convincing. In the second half of the film the spotlight is really on Dobroshi, who must leave you guessing whether she's having a moral epiphany or has just gone mad. The movie itself lets you keep on guessing, and Dobroshi gives you good reason to guess either way. The film ends sort of in medias res in a way that leaves you guessing, perhaps for the wrong reasons, but as a whole it's an eye-opening window into a Euro underworld, the humanity of which can't be denied.

Here's the trailer, uploaded to YouTube by moviestride: