Movies You Might Have Missed: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Kid with a Bike

The Belgian brothers' deeply moving film about a young boy abandoned by his father might just be their masterpiece

Thomas Doret and Cécile de France star in the Belgian filmmaker’s 2011 masterpiece

One of the cinematic highlights of 2017 was The Florida Project, a beautiful slice of social realism with a tone all of its own that captured the childlike wonder of youth in even the most trying of circumstances. Few American filmmakers have attempted to capture the working classes with such affection, although Mike Leigh and Ken Loach have done admirable work closer to home. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgian siblings whose work tends to have a distinct left-wing slant, have produced a handful of great films, and The Kid with a Bike (2011) might just be their masterpiece.

Set in Seraing (like Florida, not the most obvious location for a film), The Kid with a Bike is shot in the usual naturalistic style favoured by the Dardennes but with a brighter aesthetic than usual, perhaps, as in The Florida Project, an attempt to simulate a childlike way of viewing the world as full of wonder and possibility. Thomas Doret plays Cyril, a young boy with behavioural issues living in a children’s home who tries to reconnect with his father at the start of the film. As a seemingly random act of kindness, a local hairdresser agrees to foster the lad on weekends. Cyril is also taken under the wing of a local gang leader and one is never quite sure what path he will take in a harsh and unforgiving world.

The Dardennes have said that their original idea for the picture was about “a woman who helps a boy emerge from the violence that holds him prisoner”, and that the script was structured with a fairytale in mind, the hairdresser imagined as a fairy-like creature who would help the boy lose his illusions. Like much of Leigh’s best work, the siblings decided to give away next to nothing about the characters’ pasts in order to avoid sentimentality.

There is a distinct lack of bad language used by the teenagers, a tactic employed by the Dardennes to lighten the mood somewhat. This is social realism with a poetic flourish and it is perhaps unsurprising that the duo spent the first two decades of their career making documentaries. There is not a wasted moment in the 87 minutes, but the film has so much to say about love, family and the ways in which we are all, to some extent, victims of circumstance.

The Kid with a Bike, like the Dardennes’ follow-up, Two Days, One Night, is a compassionate masterpiece that ought to be considered essential viewing.