The worst thing that can happen to a child, at least from the
child’s own point of view, is rejection by a parent. And maybe
there is something even beyond that horror for a boy who is
rejected by his father, since in that case the denial of love is
compounded by a kind of denial of the child’s own existence. The
man whose place you can’t help feeling you were born to take in
this world tells you he doesn’t want you in his place anymore — or
his world. It’s a bit like one of those “after-birth
abortions,” the apologists for which were recently
shocked to learn had shocked even a culture inured, as our is, to
abortion-on-demand.
Yet the story of such a rejection, like Le gamin au
vélo (“The Kid With a Bike”) by the Belgian brothers
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, may be robbed of a full portion of
what would otherwise be its elemental power by having to be told,
ex hypothesi, of a child, and through a child’s eyes. Much
as we sympathize with any child who suffers such a ghastly
rejection, we are still able to palliate the horror of the child’s
experience to ourselves by reflecting that he is a child. He’ll get
over it. Or, if not get over it, he will learn some coping
mechanism and have a life of his own to compensate him for being
turned out of others’ lives. The loss is not irrecoverable, as that
of some deaths or a loss of position or reputation can be to an
adult.
Stories about such absolute losses, therefore, retain
their power where stories about a child’s loss, even when to the
child it is every bit as bad, lose some of theirs. In a way this
paradox — very unfair, of course, as so much of life is — is a
confirmation of the point made by the would-be child-killers of the
amusingly named Journal of Medical Ethics. They thought it
might be OK to kill kids because they were not yet “actual persons”
but only potential ones. You don’t have to agree with that
appalling example of moral reasoning to acknowledge that not being
“actual persons” — in the ethicists’ sense of being able to
comprehend one’s own existence and therefore understand what it is
to lose it — can sometimes protect kids as well as making them
more vulnerable. Potentiality, as opposed to actuality, may
preserve them to a greater or lesser degree from the full effect of
losses that would kill an adult.
At any rate, that seems to me to be the sinkhole lying in
the way of the Dardennes’ movie. Cyril (Thomas Doret), a boy of ten
or eleven, finds himself in an institution of some kind when his
dad (Jérémie Renier) decamps, and he is furious about it — not at
his dad but at the “counselors” of the state-run home. They, he has
no doubt, are lying to him when they tell him that dad is gone.
Cyril knows better because he knows that, even if dad did sell up
and move away, he would not have sold Cyril’s bike. As Cyril
doesn’t have his bike, it must be still with his dad who, likewise,
must still be in the dingy apartment in Liege where he and Cyril
used to live. Even when the boy runs away and returns to the
apartment, finding it empty, even when he is told that another kid
has been seen riding his bike, he refuses to believe the truth. It
must be a different bike. The other kid must have stolen it. Dad
would not have sold it.
While attempting to hide from the counselors, Cyril takes
refuge in a doctor’s office, and, when they find him there, rather
than allow them to lead him away, he seizes hold of a woman in the
doctor’s waiting room. “You can hold me,” she says to him mildly,
“but not so tight.” This turns out to be Samantha (Cécile De
France), who runs her own hair-dressing salon. It’s a nice touch
that this stranger becomes, quite gratuitously, the missing reality
principle in Cyril’s life, first by tracking down and buying back
the bike for him and, then, by proving to him that his missing dad
had sold it. As the attachment between Samantha and Cyril
grows, she also helps him hunt down his father, who has moved to
another city and taken a job in a restaurant, and then she insists
that dad tell Cyril the truth — that he wants no more to do with
him — rather than stringing him along with vague promises of
telephoning some day.
I didn’t much mind that no explanation was given for
Samantha’s heroic act of compassion in, essentially, adopting
Cyril, giving him the home he has never known and even rejecting
her own non-Cyril existence in the form of her hapless boyfriend
Gilles (Laurent Caron) when the latter insists she choose between
them. I mind a bit more that Cyril’s father’s cruelty in taking the
opposite tack is similarly unexplained. Granted, such things do
happen for, more or less, no reason at all save common or garden
selfishness and absence of conscience. But the effect on the film
of making his father and, indeed, everyone else in Cyril’s life
morally uninteresting, is to put all of the dramatic weight onto
the boy himself, and to make all the dramatic tension take place
inside his poor little head. It’s too much. He is reduced to his
pathos — which is just another way of stifling him as the “actual
person” he must eventually turn out to be.
There is also something slightly formulaic about Cyril’s
turning, briefly, to crime under the tutelage of an older lost boy
and gang member calling himself Wes (Egon Di Mateo) after a
video-game character. Wes is also, apparently, fatherless and
motherless and lives with invalid grandparents. This may be an
example of the sort of social breakdown to be expected when
families break up, but it does its bit, too, to take away
individuality and moral agency from everyone except Cyril, the poor
victim of it all. Master Doret does such a good job in giving us
the boy’s pathos of loss and the intensity with which he feels it,
along with everything else, that he, along with Mlle. De France’s
portrait of adult goodness, makes the movie worth seeing. But it is
less good than it would have been if he hadn’t had to carry that
enormous load of feeling all by himself.
