You want a simple, moving tale, beautifully told? Bring on the Belgians\n\nSimplicity. It's the hardest thing to achieve in cinema, but any film-maker who pulls it off can expect to be underestimated. The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are rightly celebrated as among the best working today, but because their films are so spare and straightforward, these former documentarists are sometimes thought of as still essentially plying a documentary trade, reporting on life in deprived corners of industrial Belgium.\n\nThe Dardennes' new film, The Kid With the Bike, reveals them at their best and as they really are \u2013 superbly economical storytellers who happen to work, with precise craftsmanship, using dramatic materials that their local terrain provides. Since their 1996 feature The Promise and its follow-up, the Palme d'Or winner Rosetta, the brothers have created taut, compelling fictions set around the declining steel town of Seraing. The Kid With a Bike is their most approachable and most upbeat film to date \u2013 and as narratively satisfying as Oliver Twist \u2013 which in its own pared-down fashion, it faintly resembles.\n\nThe kid is 11-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret), living in a children's home since his absentee father dropped him there, with, it becomes clear, no intention of ever collecting him. We first meet Cyril raging to get through to his father Guy on the phone, and refusing to take a disconnected signal for a no. He won't accept that Guy has not only abandoned him but also sold his beloved bike. In one of his desperate escapes from the home, though, Cyril not only gets the bike back but acquires a surrogate mother.\n\nDucking into a doctor's surgery, he bumps into \u2013 literally bumps into \u2013 a young woman whom we barely glimpse at first. But soon after, she re-enters the picture: she's Samantha (C\u00e9cile de France), a hairdresser who has taken an interest in the boy and agrees to have him stay with her at weekends. We never find out why she's made this decision, and we don't need to. A mainstream film would have distracted us with a spurious backstory about Samantha's own deprived childhood, or whatever \u2013 but that's not the Dardennes' way. Samantha and Cyril have connected, that's all: for the Dardennes, it's a given fact, the sort of brick they build their stories on.\n\nSamantha takes Cyril to see his father, who's in a hurry to give the kid the brush-off. Because the Dardennes like working with the same actors repeatedly, the casting of Guy is resonant: J\u00e9r\u00e9mie Renier has himself played various kids with bikes in previous Dardennes films. He was the son of a slum landlord in The Promise, then a shiftless chancer who sold his baby in The Child. Renier is superb as Guy, pitiful but very human in his own childlike vulnerability. By casting him, the Dardennes not only work in echoes of those other characters but also indirectly suggest the man that Cyril might turn out to be \u2013 or not to be, if Samantha can help put him on a new path.\n\nAs it is, Cyril falls in with a small-time hood named Wes (Egon Di Mateo), and as a result, does something incredibly foolish that seems certain to make his new stability unravel. In fact Cyril is given a reprieve, but in a characteristic Dardennes move, the path to happiness \u2013 symbolised by a bucolic bicycling idyll \u2013 must take a surprising detour. We're left with an open ending that some might find infuriatingly enigmatic, others richly suggestive. Either way, you don't see it coming. If there's a happy ending, it's implied rather than delivered \u2013 let's say the Dardenne brothers make you work for it, or at least, imagine it for yourself.\n\nThe brothers have a record of unearthing raw young talent \u2013 Renier, Rosetta's Emilie Dequenne, and now Thomas Doret. His furiously energetic Cyril, driven by need for a father, for acceptance and \u2013 once he's on that bike \u2013 for sheer propulsive motion, is not so much a character as pure will. It's one of the best, rawest child performances I've seen since Kes \u2013 and the film's in that league too.\n\nDardenne purists might be shocked at the casting of C\u00e9cile de France, a mainstay of French commercial cinema, also recently seen in Clint Eastwood's Hereafter. But De France, who's actually Belgian, rolls her sleeves up for a tough, no-nonsense performance (watch Samantha dealing with a refractory boyfriend) and is a natural fit with the Dardennes' world. She also brings a tinge of down-to-earth glamour that makes Samantha a sort of dream mother to Cyril \u2013 a working-class version of Pinocchio's Blue Fairy, with DIY highlights and muscular arms. De France's Samantha and Doret's Cyril don't have it easy, don't even get on for much of the time, but they're an indomitable match made in heaven \u2013 a solid duo in a film by the most solid duo in European cinema.\n\nFive stars, review by Jonathan Romney<\/p>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/div>","fnc":"googleTrackerHelper.doTrackPage( '\/'The-Kid-With-A-Bike-film_options~47438'\/Reviews\/ViewAll\/1' );"}