THE KID WITH A BIKE - #646

There’s a scene near the very end of The Kid With aBike where the titular kid, Cyril (Thomas Doret), is riding side by side with his unexpected guardian, Samantha (Cécile de France, Mesrine [review], The Young Pope), and he asks her what gear she is pedaling in. Samantha has no idea, and only can guess looking at the gauges and levers on the handlebars. Her ignorance amuses the boy.

It also reminds me of my own biking experiences. Near the end of junior high, a few years before I could drive, I was given a ten-speed bike. It was probably nine speeds too many. No one ever explained to me what the different gears meant, much less how to shift into them. I found a setting where I could pedal comfortably, and then never touched the gears again.

The anecdote itself is completely irrelevant to examining this 2011 film from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and yet it is also everything. The pleasure of watching The Kid With a Bike [also on Filmstruck] and, in fact, all Dardenne films is the attention to personal details. Everything that happens matters to the person it happens to, and the specificity is exactly why audiences around the world, be they in the Dardenne Brothers’ native Belgium or here in the United States, identify with their stories. It’s the bigger things that separate us, and the day-to-day that proves we are all basically the same.

I don’t identify with the love of the bike that the kid has, but I identify with his willful ignorance, his refusal to let go of an idea. In this case, that his father, Guy (Dardennes-regular Jérémie Renier, Summer Hours [review]), will come back and take him out of the group home and put their lives back together. The bike becomes a symbol of that. Cyril’s father would have never gone away without giving him his beloved bike. When Samantha brings it to him and tells him she had bought it off someone who bought it from Cyril’s dad, the boy refuses to believe her.

We should all hope for angels in our life like Samantha. She only meets Cyril by chance, while going to an appointment in a medical clinic in the building where Cyril’s father was last known to live. The boy runs away from school and goes there looking for Guy, and when they try to drag him back, he literally grabs on to Samantha and won’t let go. What this sparks in her, we’ll never know. A Good Samaritan streak? A motherly instinct? Samantha agrees to take Cyril on the weekends, which proves tougher than expected when he falls in with a bad crowd. But then, Samantha is tougher than just about anybody. She stands up to the boy’s father and makes him relate his own bad news; she dumps her boyfriend when he delivers her an ultimatum about her new ward; she refuses to give up on the kid even after he’s stepped over a very dangerous line. Cécile de France is a remarkably versatile actor. In any role, be it the gangster’s moll or the public relations woman or the simple hairdresser looking for love, she is always present in the moment. She’s one of those performers that each time you see her, she seems transformed, sending you scrambling to IMDB to see why she looks familiar.

Watching The Kid With a Bike, you’ll want to knock some sense into Cyril more than once. Hell, not only because he refuses to listen, but after the second time his bike gets stolen because he didn’t lock it up, you just want to smack him upsdie the head. (I joked the movie could alternately be called The Persuasive Argument For My Vasectomy.) I don’t know where the Dardennes found Thomas Doret, but he’s excellent. The young actor has a laser-like focus and maintains his mission at all times. Cyril will not be dissuaded.

It’s nearly impossible to not think of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves [review] when examining The Kid With a Bike. It’s not just the father/son story revolving around a two-wheeler, but also the fact that moral questions are raised over the need for the bike. Cyril faces a choice, and though less motivated by self-preservation than the desperate man of De Sica’s film, to a young mind it would be just as important. Wes (Egon Di Mateo), the Fagin of Samantha’s neighborhood, offers him the kind of masculine reinforcement that Cyril seeks, and so he makes doing bad look very good. And hell, if you can’t trust your father to come through the way he’s supposed to, common rules no longer seem valid.

Additionally, the Dardennes work in a similar style to De Sica. The young actor, the real locations, the simple plot, the lack of melodrama--this 2011 Belgian film is very much in line with the 1948 Italian film’s aesthetics. Collaborating as usual with cinematographer Alain Marcoen, the Dardennes make no move that calls attention to itself. There are no tricky shots, no daring overheads, they maintain a grounded vantage point, which ultimately proves to be more immersive than some glossier fictional efforts, in that The Kid With a Bike is far more persuasive as a believable narrative. It is being lived, not choreographed.

Once upon a time when I was editing the Kitchen Sink-style comics of British cartoonist Andi Watson, we received a review that contended “nothing happened” in an issue. Of course, this was not true, we could outline many emotional twists and turns in the comic book, many actual events that the characters had to contend with. It just was lacking in “action.” As Andi quipped, just because someone didn’t get punched, it doesn’t mean nothing happened. And while there is violence in The Kid With a Bike, it is story driven, not plot driven, which is a big difference. Some might say the core scenario is very little to hang an entire film on, but the Dardennes make something grand from it.

One last anecdote that came to mind while watching The Kid With a Bike: when I was in grade school I had a brown Huffy that I was pretty keen on. That is, until I got to school and was ridiculed because it had a banana seat and no crossbar on the handle. I was told this made it a girl’s bike.  A girl’s bike befitting a boy with a girl’s name, I guess. While I didn’t come to blows with any of the kids the way that Cyril did (at least not over the bike), it did still come to represent a kind of rebellion for me--I rode it regardless of others’ taunts--and provided my personal freedom. I could go all over town on it, much faster and with more ease than on two feet. In other words, it could get me away from those other boys whom I didn’t want to hang out with anyway. Looking back, I guess it did carry a comparable power to the bike in the movie. It maybe wasn’t about my father’s love, but then, ultimately that’s not what Cyril’s represents. It’s about having a vehicle to be who we are and get us to where we feel safe.

THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD (Blu-Ray) - #628

It starts with a simple act.

A father and a son are on their delivery route, selling bread out of the back of their rickety, horse-drawn cart. To get off a back road and onto the main one, they climb out of the cart and move a row of rocks to clear the way. It's not an act the man who owns the land the trail runs across takes kindly too. His soil, his rocks, his right. However, the land actually once belonged to the deliveryman's family. Mark (Refet Abazi) believes that if he no longer has an inalienable privilege to travel what was once his grandfather's estate, taken away from him in some kind of labor dispute that resulted in the redistribution of the property, then the new owner, Sokol (Veton Osmani), can at least honor his family's tradition and let the village use the shortcut. They have words, and words lead to violence. Sokol is dead, and Mark is on the run.

A simple act in the first scene leads to murder only a few minutes later. This is how Joshua Marston kicks off The Forgiveness of Blood, an Albanian family drama rooted in tradition and universal emotion. This is Marston's second feature, following his lauded 2004 debut, Maria Full of Grace. The American director co-wrote the script with Andamion Murataj, a native of Albania (and a cinematographer normally), creating an authentic story showing the dangerous influence of ancient law on modern culture.

The people in the area where The Forgiveness of Blood is set live by an old system called Kanun. Once blood is shed, Kanun dictates that it must be answered in kind. The feud between the two families will not end until both sides are satisfied that they have exacted enough pain on their enemies. Mark goes into hiding, leaving his family to fend for itself. According to the law, the women of the clan are to be left alone, and the sons will be safe as long as they stay under house arrest. Both the teenager Nik (Tristan Halilaj) and his elementary school-aged brother Dren (Elsajed Tallalli) are forbidden to go outside, or they will likely be killed, the ultimate payback for what Mark has done. Their mother can still work, and their adolescent sister, Rudina (Sindi Lacej), is forced to take over her father's delivery route. There is no other way for them to make money.

The primary narrative of The Forgiveness of Blood follows Nik and Rudina as they cope with the absurd situation that has been forced on them. They are regular 21st-century teenagers, with cell phones and ambitions of their own. Nik likes girls and he dreams of opening his own shop, presumably an internet café of some kind. Boredom overtakes him when he's in lockdown, and his restlessness develops into a kind of neuroses. He grows more irresponsible the more Rudina starts taking charge. Other men are competing with her to sell bread to her clients, and so she starts trafficking in cigarettes. The imbalance that says she is off limits is tested by friend and foe alike. Nik still expects her to clean house and make dinner; one of Sokol's cousins breaks the rules by threatening the girl when she's on the job. This leads to both children wanting to come to some kind of mediation with the other family, something that can only happen if their father either goes to jail or gets killed.

The true conflict of The Forgiveness of Blood is not the warring clans, but a battle within the generation gap, with additional touches of the culture clash resulting from the introduction of technology into a rural area. Mobile phones and first-person shooter video games look like anachronisms, like the film crew wasn't paying enough attention to the background details in their backwoods period picture. Though Nik can be pouty and selfish, it's hard not to identify with the unfairness of the situation. His entire life comes to a screeching halt, and any attempts he makes to become a part of the process of fixing it are rebuffed by the religious and tribal elders. Any American who grew up in a Christian household and argued with parents over rules imposed by the Bible can relate to Nik's frustration at being beholden to Kanun. This set of standards doesn't reflect his chosen morality, and as long as he is forced to stick by them, he can't come into his own. He sees a world that is changing faster than his neighbors are ready to contend with.

The juxtaposition this creates with Rudina makes for some splendid commentary. Her plight is the opposite: she is being forced to grow up too fast, and so she is getting into things she shouldn't. There is one tension-filled scene where she goes to the neighboring city to try to buy contraband cigarettes, despite having no real idea what she is doing. The image of her driving her horse and buggy across a bridge while cars and trucks get jammed up behind her makes for a powerful illustration of just how off the map her upbringing has been. Marston has to do very little to fill us with fear, watching this innocent willingly jump into a dangerous situation.

But anyone who saw Maria Full of Grace knows that Marston's talent is in making a whole lot out of very little. His is a cinema of the observed, of individual moments driven by small gestures. The most poignant elements of The Forgiveness of Blood grow from behavior and action rather than dialogue or contrivance. Nik's obsession with the cracks in his bedroom wall needs no further explanation, and so it's fitting that when Rudina demands to know why he has made them worse, he says nothing. Both of these young actors are exceptional finds. Marston guides them properly, and they appear unmannered and ordinary on screen. These are just a couple of kids, they just happen to be here. The filming style, which largely uses natural light to achieve an almost painterly visual aesthetic, leans toward off-the-cuff, probing shots more akin to documentary than indie melodrama. I wouldn't quite call it mumblecore, it's more planned than that. Marston keeps The Forgiveness of Blood in the moment without ever forgetting it's an actual film. His storytelling could easily be compared to the Dardennes, as well as much of what is currently coming out of South America (such as is rounded up here in Christopher McQuain's review of The Milk of Sorrow).

The best fictions take us from a life we know and plops us down in another, allowing us to experience the unfamiliar and find elements we recognize within it. While I know little of Albania, much less what it would be like to grow up there, The Forgiveness of Blood delivers a story that anyone should be able to find identifiable elements within. Joshua Marston is an empathetic author, one who engenders empathy from his audience. In both of his films, he avoids judging the events, and instead just relates them so that, in turn, we can relate to them.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk. Images here were taken from promotional materials and were not taken from the Blu-Ray under review.

LA PROMESSE (Blu-Ray) - #620

Whenever self-important reviewers such as myself complain about the preponderance of blockbusters and their dominance over ticket sales at multiplexes, it's because there are films like La promesse that, with a tiny budget and a persistence of vision, communicate so much more that most massive special effects spectacles ever could. It's not really a proposition of either/or--I like both sides of this coin--but if I had to choose one or the other, I'd always call for “heads.” Simple tales of humanity are far more meaningful and far more deserving of our dollars and our praise.

La promesse is the 1996 effort of Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, and it's largely credited as the movie that brought these talented filmmakers to the attention of the rest of the world. La promesse stars a young Jérémie Renier, a Dardenne regular. Like Jean-Pierre Léaud in Francois Truffaut's films, Renier has literally grown up over the course of the Dardenne oeuvre. Here he plays Igor, a confident and cagey young crook who is, at least at the start of the picture, engaged in two apprenticeships. One is with the increasingly frustrated mechanic (Frédérique Bodson) who has given the kid a job, and the other is with the boy's father, Roger (Olivier Gourmet), a hustler who is making bank smuggling immigrants into Belgium and then putting them to work on his construction sites while simultaneously siphoning off their wages for outrageous rental fees and other necessary gray-market aid. Roger isn't a completely bad guy. He loves his son and is ostensibly doing all of this to buy a house where they can live, but he is blind to the toll his actions take. Not just on the immigrants, but on Igor, who is being robbed of a regular adolescence and also of better opportunities for his adult future by learning the family business at the expense of a legitimate education.

Igor's life starts to pivot with the arrival of Assita (Assita Ouédraogo) and her baby. She has come from Africa to join her husband and the child's father, Hamidou (Rasmane Ouédraogo), who has already been working for Roger for a little while and is in debt both to him and to the gangsters he gambles with. Igor gets along with Hamidou, and he takes a liking to Assita, who is headstrong and clings to the culture and religion she brought with her. When Hamidou is injured in a construction accident, he makes Igor promise to look after his family. The boy takes this debt seriously, though his father sees things differently. If anyone finds out Hamidou is dead, it will mean serious consequences for him and Igor both, and Assita is the only one likely to wonder where the man has gone.

It's from such a fragile construct that great things emerge. La promesse is not heavy on traditional plot. This isn't a potboiler or any other sort of predictable crime film, even if criminal behavior is at its narrative center. Rather, the positioning of these characters, who they are and what they do, provides the seeds for the greater story to grow. La promesse is a film about how people get along and how they react to unexpected circumstances. More importantly, it's a story about how one boy comes to recognize his own conscience and develop his own ethical code in the face of some heavy opposition.

Jérémie Renier was born to be in front of a movie camera. His presence on screen is unaffected and natural in the most convincing and compelling sense. His performance has none of the woodenness that sometimes emerges when Neorealist directors cast non-actors or indie filmmakers work with amateurish newcomers. There isn't a moment of La promesse that comes off as rehearsed or scripted; the Dardennes elicit a true illusion of spontaneity from all of their performers. Olivier Gourmet is particularly effective as the father. He seems to always be one step behind what is happening, caught up in his own efforts to be one step ahead. The climactic scene between Roger and Igor is heartbreaking, frustrating, and dangerous. Like the boy, we are almost sucked in by the man's defenses, even though our gut tells us he'll do whatever it takes to survive.

Much of the spontaneous feel of La promesse is down to how the movie is shot. The Dardenne Bros., alongside director of photography Alain Marcoen and camera operator Benoît Dervaux, favor a more stealthy aesthetic. They don't plan big, elaborate shots or frame any of their scenes in ways that call attention to the construction; rather, they prefer more intimate, fly-on-the-wall positioning. Following the characters, tracking their reactions, staying with their faces--this is the visual power of La promesse. There are no self-conscious handheld jitters, nothing here that would put La promesse in the faux documentary genre or that precedes the jiggling, probing zooms of mumblecore, and even so, it plays as a movie that was captured off-the-cuff, as things were happening, all the same.

The suspense of La promesse is not really in seeing how Assita and her baby get along, though as audience members we certainly become invested in their journey; rather, the pins and needles come from wondering how much of himself Igor will compromise. Will he or won't he go all the way and tell the full truth? The Dardennes are careful not to telegraph the conclusion, letting the throughline stretch all the way to the final scene. And then when it comes, they let the movie close on just the right note. The small action of the individual may have big meaning, but the ripples it causes may also be imperceptible. The fact is, life rarely stops, not even in the most tragic of times. Regardless of the moral justifications or the peace that may come from sharing difficult truths, the earth does not shatter, nor do the people exposing the lies or those receiving the knowledge. You take one breath, and then you take another, and so it goes.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk.