Fraternal filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose Belgian drama The Kid With a Bike (2011) opens this week at Music Box, are justly celebrated as masters of social realism. Movies like Rosetta (1999), The Son (2002), and L’Enfant (2005) are immersive experiences, arriving at powerful epiphanies through their off-hand observation of working-poor characters. The handheld camera work, some of the most spontaneous in contemporary movies, creates the impression that we’re racing to catch up with these people, an effect that’s only enhanced by the brothers’ tendency to elide any moments of downtime. And because their characters come across as genuine people, viewers can forget these films are actually written, designed, and directed.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
On the other hand, genre storytelling informs the Dardennes’ art as much as any tradition of realism. The Kid With a Bike, about an abandoned boy and the foster mother trying to help him, makes a powerful statement about the plight of unwanted children. But it also incorporates elements of melodrama, film noir, and even the fairy tale that engage our empathy and confirm the Dardennes’ great compassion.
The Kid With a Bike communicates its themes so directly that most children could appreciate it. In fact, the movie is remarkable for the way it suggests a fairy tale without sacrificing realism. In a recent Film Comment interview, the Dardennes discussed how “fairy-tale logic” guided certain decisions they made, such as dressing Cyril exclusively in red or setting his rendezvous with the dealer and his gang in the woods. This logic extends to most of the characters too: though they all face difficult choices, they’re clearly divided into good and bad people. The bad ones think only of themselves, while the good ones learn to see beyond their immediate gain and think about others’ well-being (this moral is common to children’s stories, though it’s more sophisticated than the thinking of many R-rated movies).
Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
