Dardenne & Dardenne: Le Gamin au Vélo (The Kid with a Bike) (2011)

On the face of it, The Kid With A Bike is one of the Dardennes’ sunniest films – it’s the first film that they’ve shot in summer, the first to include a soundtrack and the first to feature something approaching a sentimental narrative: a young boy, passed from foster home to foster home, who strikes up a redemptive rapport with a young woman. Moreover, it’s the first film to downplay Seraing as an industrial city – while the Dardennes’ earlier films have sometimes taken parks, green belts and traffic islands as their backdrops, they’ve never felt quite so uncontaminated by the city as they do here; this is the first film in which the brothers glimpse something like a genuine countryside. What’s striking, then, is that this is simultaneously, undoubtedly, the same universe - shot through with sudden explosions that bring everyone to the ground, Seraing still exudes a heightened gravitational field that you can only escape by setting yourself in compulsive, propulsive motion, latching onto the slipstream of its omniscient traffic flow.  Various narrative and stylistic touches recall The Promise, and so the film feels like a revision of that story for the next generation – a generation that’s still faced with all the same industrial subjugation and agony, but at the hands of a city that’s managed to somehow conceal its industrial exploitation behind a post-industrial facelift, a gentrification program that’s replaced the endless petrol stations of the Dardennes’ earlier work with boutique restaurants and service sectors. Insofar as industry does re-emerge, it’s as a backdrop to the video games that punctuate the narrative – and, unlike many other directors, the Dardennes aren’t especially critical of first-person shooters, since they provide a reminder that industry is somehow still with us, as well as offering a similar propulsiveness to the brothers themselves; as films like Rosetta make viscerally clear, the Dardennes are less interested in characters than in avatars. As a retreat from social commentary, then, it’s deceptive – it’s a bold challenge to a new regime, a regime that seems to preclude precisely the articulation of labour that has preoccupied the Dardennes throughout their career.