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.