"The Kid With A Bike" - Film Review

The Kid With A Bike is about a kid who wants his dad, and instead ends up with a bike.  

Cyril Catoul (Thomas Doret) is living in a group home. His father Guy (Jeremie Renier) put him in one, claiming it would be for only a month. A month has passed though, and Cyril is now upset. He thinks the home is trying to keep him away from his father. He’s idealized the man, but the man is not how Cyril imagines him to be. He’s a deadbeat who wants nothing to do with his son. 

Cyril spends much of the film searching for fathers or father-figures. The one person who seems to have actual interest in him is kindly hairdresser Samantha (Cecile de France) who takes in the boy on weekends after meeting him by chance. She’s trying her best to get through to Cyril who is quietly stewing, frustrated, unresponsive and confused. But we can tell Cyril’s antics are beginning  to wear on her; she’s becoming exasperated.

Cyril is too young to truly understand the opportunity he’s stumbled upon in this woman. She’s a working woman, struggling to make due, and yet she can't help but help this kid. She doesn’t know the boy but she sees from their first meeting that this is a sweet kid deep down, simply troubled and distrusting.

The boy rides around on a bike constantly throughout the film. It’s the one thing in life he seems to get any enjoyment from. The bike keeps getting stolen and Cyril has to get it back. He tracks down the bike in one instance to a youth gang, where the leader recognizes an easy target and manipulates Cyril. He plays the father-figure that Cyril so desperately desires. He’s giving Cyril all the attention and responses he thinks he wants and deserves, rather than the sterner love Samantha provides him. 

The film takes a starkly realistic approach to its subject matter. There’s little romanticism to be found here. The most sentimental scenes are in quietly stolen moments between Samantha and Cyril. The film even finds some oddly metaphysical material to work with when Cyril coincidentally runs into two people he attacked as part of a crime with the gang leader. But on the whole the film tells its story with confounding simplicity.   

The film discovers quiet tragedy and emotional devastation in its realistically drawn story. Cyril is doggedly resolved upon finding his father, despite his father’s absolute disinterest in having anything to do with him. When he finally discovers him, after he avoids a meeting Samantha set up, Guy quickly dismisses his son before telling Samantha he doesn’t want to see him. Samantha can’t bring herself to tell Cyril and makes the man tell his son the truth. Cyril is quiet on the car ride home, and then he snaps. All Samantha can do is hold him.

When we first meet Cyril, he's running away from the group home. Throughout the film we keep witnessing him running away. He's distancing himself from his problems and avoiding hard truths. As the film starts, he doesn't have the bike, his father has sold it away (They must have stole it from him, Cyril says). Even as Samantha buys it back for him, he can't accept that it was sold away. Even when he does accept things, he learns that life is never that easy or that fair.

Grade: A-