Screens at CIFF: 10/8 & 10/9
World premiere: 15 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival

The terrible admission first: I have not to this point had much use for the Brothers Dardenne, Jean-Pierre and Luc, the Belgian filmmakers who've managed the rare trick of winning two Palmes d'Or with 1999's Rosetta and 2005's L'enfant. I'll plead a minuscule sample size (only L'enfant and the 2002 The Son) but what I've seen hasn't exactly driven me to seek out the rest. The combination of social realism with an artfully discombobulated style - by which I mean, the things they do with handheld camera makes even the most notorious shakycam action picture look like a stately piece of classical Hollywood filmmaking - doesn't seem to add up to much more than deliberately alienating looks at Real Life The Way It Is Lived that are good in the most irritating way possible.

So, having confessed that, I'm sure the Dardenne faithful don't actual care what I think about the Cannes Grand Prix winner The Kid with a Bike (they've won major prizes at that fest with four of their last five pictures, which must make them among the most Cannes-fêted directors in history), though in point of fact I rather liked it a lot. What, if anything, has changed in the Dardennes' aesthetic, I cannot say; perhaps it's merely that by focusing on a boy living in abject misery, the film gets to cheat its way into the rich tradition of European art movies about sad little boys; perhaps the film's contrivances and narrative elisions make it feel more like a neo-realist fairy tale and less like neo-realism.

The kid in the title is Cyril Catoul (Thomas Doret), living in a childrens' home, where he was left by his father - "for a month", he was promised but we who are aware that this is a harsh European slice-of-life art film already have our suspicions. As the film begins, Cyril doesn't even have a bike; in fact, it is in the process of trying to find his bike, which was stashed in his dad's apartment, that Cyril begins to learn to his absolute disbelief that the promised month is going to a bit longer. The forever kind of longer. Cyril quickly discovers that his bike has been sold to another little boy, and in his angry fit that follows he smacks into Samantha (Cécile De France), a hairdresser, who buys the bike back for him; this unexpected act of kindness leads the boy to ask Samantha if she'll let him stay with her on the weekends, and she says yes.

We are never, over the course of the whole movie, given any reason to understand why Samantha makes this choice: no bromides about her own broken childhood or her shattered dreams of being a mother. She simply says that he can stay, and that is that. It's a significant gap in the narrative that may well be the key to The Kid with a Bike working as well as it does: for it's here that the film dodges from the typical realism of the opening 15 minutes (it cannot be an accident that the film starts off with so many apparent references to Bicycle Thieves) into a mixture of realism and fable that is certainly unusual, and to my tastes, a good deal more engaging for it.

From this point, the drama is primarily about Cyril's relationship with this guardian angel, and how the boy learns slowly & through a fair amount of pain that there is love in the world and there are people who will take you as you are, and not as you can be once they've changed you. It takes suffering to get there, in the form of Cyril's father Guy (Jérémie Renier), who is finally located and has to break the hard news to his boy that it was not at all an accident that he ducked out; and there is also temptation, a dubious surrogate father figure in the local thug (Egon Di Mateo) who takes to grooming Cyril for a spot in his gang.

Even in what passes for a fairy tale mood, that is to say, the Dardennes are still all about the miserabilism, and Cyril's awakening to the knowledge that Samantha wishes for him to be well and happy & does not in any way need him to change for her comes at the end of quite a lot of agony. But it's that very agony that makes the ending, which is "happy" without being overly pat and vigorously resolved in the best mainstream fashion, so very sweet and meaningful.

I cannot be done with the film without mentioning the acting: Cécile De France has been good enough times that it's hopefully not a surprise to anybody that she knocks this one out of the park, but even by that standard, it's easily the best performance I've ever seen her give, an even more impressive achievement given how intentionally spare her character is on the page. But it's first-timer Doret who knocks it out of the park (child non-actors are always better than adult non-actors, I find), tapping into something genuinely frightening in Cyril's all-consuming obsession with retaining his father's love: it's a startlingly non-lovable turn for a young actor, full of irritated energy and ugly desperation, and it's as brilliant as any child performance I've seen in the last few years.

Better still, Doret's approach to Cyril leaves the film with a whole lot of nervous energy, which translates into the shaky, fluid camera movements common to Dardenne productions impeccably well: ordinarily, their low-fi aesthetic has always annoyed me, but here where it's based in character and psychology, it even works in the film's favor. Whether that means that I have been missing the point all these years or the brothers have, at least the results here are substantial and impressive and entirely moving.