shelters, fathers, and haptic cinema

The Kid with a Bike (2011)

Le Gamin au Vélo (The Kid with a Bike) segues well from my last post. This recent film by the Dardenne Brothers’ begins in a children’s shelter where the 11-year-old Cyril has been marooned by his father. In the first shot, Cyril holds a telephone receiver tightly against his head listening to an automated message: the number has been disconnected. He refuses to let go of the receiver and makes the social worker dial again. The social worker tells the boy that his father has probably moved away, but Cyril again refuses to give up the receiver. The telephone, like the bicycle that the boy attempts to recover, remains the only if line he has to his father, and he holds onto it as a paternal umbilical cord, one that connects him to a void. 

Like Rosetta (1999), The Kid with a Bike follows species precarious life, the human beings who fight desperately for entry into social institutions--the factory, the family--from which they have been rendered extraneous. Like the factory under neoliberalism, the father, Guy Catoul, wants to "start over" and hence needs to get rid of his son so that he can enter the job market on an equal footing. Cyril is left indefinitely in a shelter, and in his search for his bike he meets Samantha, a hairdresser of moderate means. Samantha finds his bike and ends up a weekend foster mother. Shuffling between a shelter and a surrogate mother, however, does not allow Cyril peace of mind. He remains desperate to be taken in by his father and whatever substitutes for male authority he can find. Which lands him in the usual situation of criminal activity on behalf of a guy they call "the dealer."

But the film is more than this. The narrative elements can only give us the generic sociological structure of abandoned youth, not the radical experience of this abandonment. More important here are the telephone receiver, the buzzer system to the vacant apartment where Cyril seeks to find his dad (see trailer), the glass doors into which he peers--this is the architecture, the interface, of modern precariousness. Each is a black box from which Cyril solicits his father, in flesh and blood. He is not, in principle, refused entry, but he finds out that behind these interfaces there are only empty addresses and recorded messages.

Cyril, however, does not lament when confronted with information terminals made to exclude him. He navigates these territories with tactical cunning. After being told that his father has moved out of the apartment, Cyril buzzes the apartment building's medical ward and tells them that he hurt his leg. They let him in and he runs up to his father's empty room. Mere information, e.g. the reality principle effected by the words "your father has moved," does not faze him. His tactics are not those of empty words but of touch: he touches the material world he navigates; he needs to feel them with his own hands and see them with his own eyes, yet sensory reality interests him little: it is resistance, an obstinacy of matter that bars him from the places where his father is not. Cyril's touch is one that is sensuous but does not admit to sensuality, nor sentimentality. He meets Samantha as he tries to escape the social workers; he latches onto her waist and refuses to let go: this is the gesture of an inexplicable, desperate, touch, an "I need you" that is entirely haptic yet does not become a desire. And it is perhaps for this reason that Samantha comes to love Cyril and admit him into her life.

In a parallel manner, the Dardenne Brothers' cinematography and sound design are those of a haptic cinema, a cinema that wants to make us touch. It is characteristic for their camera to follow their subjects up close, and their subjects move as if they were trying to escape the invasive grasp of the camera's presence, which seems to threaten them not so much with its visual power as with its physicality. The camera that is too close then makes contact through the intimate, magnified, sounds of skin against clothing, teeth on food, feet on pavement. The aesthetic is one of bodily immediacy, and a body that resists the world in its mere sensory aspect, in the bare fact that it exists and dares to do so. Even in the film's tenderest moments, as when Cyril and Samantha (after Cyril has frustrated all his father fantasies and submits to her motherness) eat sandwiches in the park, we are reminded of Cyril's precarious, bare, life. Between his genuine smiles and increasing comfort with Samantha, he retains the appearance of an animal who is liable to escape at any moment. There is nothing idyllic about this sequence (and to this extent, the screenshot I have here is misleading), nonetheless, it hints at the possibility of a maternal affection that is felt out, with no guarantees. Samantha's boyfriend, dismayed at the child's unruliness, and perplexed at why she would take him tells her to make a choice: him or me. She chooses the boy, whom she cannot be certain loves her, who in fact betrays her very shortly after--running off to commit a robbery for "the dealer"/substitute father. But he returns to her because there is nowhere else to go, he returns out of mere helplessness, out of the need for shelter, and she takes him in, knowing that the cops are after him. It is made clear that this is not an act of unconditional maternal forgiveness. It is a social contract. "I want to stay with you full time" he says. "Kiss me" she says. The kiss on the cheek seals a new social bond, but one that has no shelter under a paternal metaphor, or any law of filation.

And the bicycle. It is impossible to make a film about a bicycle today without referring it somehow to Ladri di Biciclette. And in fact, we have in both films a father, a boy, and a bicycle. In De Sica the bicycle functions as a device to discern the relationship between father and child amidst social topography of postwar Rome. The bicycle disappears into the impenetrable webs of city life, and father and son disappear into a crowd of urban poor. Le Gamin au Vélo ends as the father disappears and the child rides his bike down the street and off screen. The bike, rather than referring the father to work and societal viability, refers the boy to the void that is his father. Like the telephone receiver, it is the concretion of what has abandoned him, and he holds onto with dear life. Yet, when the boy rides his bike into the film's end credits, his illusions of paternal authority have been ruptured, at least for the time being: what we have are instead precarious sensory assemblages and their lines of flight: kid-bike, Cyril-Samantha. The brief stint of orchestral music in the film's final image tells us that there might still be in all of this, if not a future, then at least a hope.

The Polisse-The Future-The Child

So this French version of Cops wins the Jury prize at Cannes, and I'm perplexed as to why. Perhaps I'm not being fair, but let me explain and diagnose. Maïwenn's Polisse is in a sense an archival film. Its screenplay was constructed by rifling through the case files of the Paris Child Protection Unit, yes the unit that arrests pedophiles. With a kind of reality-TV aesthetic, the film unfolds several months in the life of the members of the CPU. The film's only narrative cue is the arrival of Maïwenn herself as a photographer assigned to the unit by the French government; predictably, the photographer doubles the presence of the film camera, and functions as authorial signature (which the trailer above seems to emphasize). The reality TV cinematography is marked and disorienting: staccato cutting, liberal use of the zoom function, and sustained diegetic sound establish an "on-the-spot" feel that nonetheless is reminiscent of a well-worn televisual repertoire, e.g.The Office and Arrested Development


In a sense the film's jarring form is justified by its diegetic motifs. After all, the world of child molesters is very much a harsh one, and the film seeks to capture both the numbing violence and the anger that these officers experience in their job. The form blocks sentimentality and produces in the spectator the same nausea and disgust one would confront "in the field"--and successful it was at convincing at least five people to walk out of the theater at the late-night screening where I saw the film. There is, however, a deeper dimension to both the film's form and its content (and their zone of indiscernability) that I wish to register here, one that articulates an interesting if disturbing link between the portable cinematic apparatus and apparatuses of State power. My comments, of course, are meant to be broadly applicable.


The central thematic crisis of the film seems to be that of "the Child," its status and futurity in the contemporary world. What lines are there between children and adults? How does the law regulate this relationship? Polisse depicts the desperate attempts of law enforcement agencies to maintain an adequate distinction between the adult and the child by rigorously enforcing standards of child abuse ("any sexual interaction between a parent and a child is rape" as one of the officer says). The crisis of the child is exacerbated by the presence of immigrants both old and new in a Paris of multicultural anxieties.  The Child Protection Unit, after receiving a lead on a certain uncle in a Romanian trailer park who enlists children as pickpockets and prostitutes, enacts a raid on the entire encampment, arresting all the adults and taking the children to a "shelter." In a hauntingly ambivalent sequence, the children are photographed with nameplates and made to board a bus--the topoi here are unmistakable. Yet, Maïwenn appears to be unwilling to entertain the significance of the graphic match between child protection and the concentration camp, so the sequence ends with the bus driver turning on music and the children miraculously forget recent history as they begin to dance. This is too not an unfamiliar image--discos are, after all, made for forgetting. But it becomes less innocent when disco music is used to justify the actions of the police.


It is this forgetting that ensures that there will be no posterity. First of all, there is the breakdown of the bourgeois family, that institutionalized imposter in the history of cultures. There are no nuclear families in the film, only pedophiles and romances "on the force." In perhaps the most allegorical sequence in the film (if one chooses to allegorize), a fourteen year old rape victim has a stillborn baby. She asks "what will happen to him?" "Will he be buried with all the other babies?" "Yes." "Individually or all together?" "All Together." The police place the corpse inside a cooler and take it to the lab for DNA tests. Futurity enters into the cold laboratories and hallways of the State, which alone ensures the continuation of the Nation. This is the state of exception in which the film places us. The center of the film's anxiety is that children do not understand themselves as children: one makes naked videos of herself on the internet, another matter-of-factly states that she gave a blowjob to have a thief return her smartphone. Yet, for all this crisis in the definition of the Child, agencies of the State are given even wider purview to define and enforce what it sees as proper relationships. One cop, Iris,  sees a woman shaking her baby from the coffeeshop. She stops the woman and takes her in for questioning, since this seemed abnormal behavior. During the interview, the woman admits that she jerks off one of her boys so to quiet him down. Iris tells her, here, that any sexual interaction between parent and child is rape. In another instance, Nora, who herself appears Algerian, interrogates a Muslim man; fed up with his condescension towards her on account of her gender, she threatens to charge him for accessory to rape after his daughter's arranged marriage is consummated. It is undeniable that in each instance there is a "justice" at stake--one that in fact may very much be worth defending--but this justice, in order to make itself known, in order to mark the territory of its guilt, is made to enter increasingly dark corridors of exceptionality. The Child is the state of exception, the place in which the future cannot simply be allowed to "take place."


Let us now go to the place of the authorial signature, which in this film very much does function as a kind of navel or severed umbilical cord. In the middle of a citywide search for a mother who kidnapped her baby from day care, Joey Starr's character (Fred) confronts the photographer-director, chiding her for "snapping away" with her camera, and challenging her as to what kind of truth the camera could capture. He tells her that the camera can never "do justice" to "what we do." There is no answer. In a sense, "what we do" exists beyond cinema; it is exceptional, and contra Bazin, the truth of "what we do" does not "lay itself bare like a suspect confessing under the relentless examination of the commissioner of police." Perhaps films about the police can never make the police confess...another instantiation of the age old dilemma: "who polices the police?" The exceptionality of "what we do" with respect to the mundane powers of cinema will be repeated again and again in the film through its repertoire of citations. During the manhunt for the woman-kidnapper, someone suggests that the woman has dyed her hair so that nobody recognizes her, and the rejoinder: "what do you think this is? a Western?" No it is not a Western. "What we do" is real, not a movie. The film's citation of Le Mepris in a game of charades seems to echo this point--this is a film about the excess of the real to the dream factory, with the one catch that the real is policework. The breakdown of the holy family means that the great burden of social reproduction is shifted onto our men in blue, who must wrest all children away from the icky interiorities of the oedipal triangle and put them in shelters... at least in France they have the funding for shelters.

A final two sequences merit discussion. As the police interview a father who "loves [his daughter] too much," but has "connections" such that he can afford to act pompous, Fred becomes enraged and punches the man in the face. The guy says "you'll pay for this" and Fred replies "no one saw anything...this camera didn't see anything."  The man replies, "yes I know, the camera sees what you want it to see." Of course cameras at police stations see what the police want them to see, but this is not quite the point. Fred is enraged because the man dares to openly say that he likes young girls in a blasé mode and "on camera" as if here were not aware of the gravity of the charge. It is not that he refuses to confess to the commissioner of police; it is rather than the man openly confesses without the weight of guilt, before the camera. Which reveals the fact that guilt, like "what we do," cannot be recorded by cameras. On the contrary, guilt must be inscribed, as Kafka said, on the body of the guilty until the body is made into a bloody pulp, until it has been entirely metamorphosed into the inscription of its crime. The pedophile's lack of internalized guilt, itself a effect of his corruption, makes it that Fred must produce this guilt through violence, and thus Fred (and perhaps us too) wants to beat the man to a bloody pulp, then draw and quarter him before the crowd. To this process, to guilt such as it is consecrated in the most ancient sense, modern media are fundamentally indifferent. Hence, the film  never gives us a chance to register guilt, to make images confess. The film's haptic cuts crowd the sensorium; it never gives us time to think--to think about what? guilt. It is in this sense that the raid on the gypsy encampment can only produce a graphic match with the camps before the disco music begins.


And the film ends in a graphic match, uncharacteristically in slow motion and to non-diegetic music, between two falling bodies. On one hand, there is a boy (who had previously been a victim of molestation). doing a mid-air flip at a gymnastics competition. On the other hand, Iris has decided to jump out a window pursuant to a restructuring of the police department. She falls, he flips. She falls, he flips. An adult who dies, a child who completes his flip, two forms sent flying through mid air, one towards death the other towards the future. But there is nothing. Only the most abstract of forms.