The Boy with the Bicycle

After his father has placed him in a children's home, there is only one goal for twelve-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret): he wants to go back to his dad. But escaping from the home won't get him anywhere either, since his father has since moved out of his apartment and Cyril doesn't know the new address. But then the boy meets Samantha (Cécile De France), owner of a hair salon. Despite his closed, dismissive nature, the young woman agrees to take Cyril in on weekends and help him find his father. With a lot of patience and love, Samantha tries to take away the boy's inner rage. But this seems to be a hopeless endeavour. When Cyril then also makes friends with a criminal youth, Samantha's efforts threaten to fail for good.

The Boy with the Bicycle is a very quiet drama that strives for great realism. The Belgian director brothers Dardenne do not want to touch with overdrawn emotions, but with believable characters and comprehensible conflicts. And exactly here lies the problem of the film. As well as new discovery Thomas Doret and Cécile De France play, their characters remain relatively unapproachable. The audience doesn't learn why Cyril was disowned by his father, what happened to his mother, or why Samantha chooses to care for the boy in the first place. Certainly, it's primarily about the relationship between Cyril and Samantha and the young woman's desperate attempts to keep an inherently lovable boy from going astray and to provide him with a nice life despite all adverse circumstances. The back story of the characters could therefore in principle be considered rather unimportant to this story.

But when Samantha decides again and again to give the boy another chance despite constant setbacks and even ends her relationship for it, one already wonders as a viewer what drives this woman to act this way. Also, the scenes between Cyril and his father could be of greater emotional impact if it was clear what exactly happened that made the man turn away from his son in such a way. As it is, the whole thing is a very authentic drama. But it also creates a certain emotional distance to the characters, which prevents the viewer from being really touched by the fate of the protagonists.

Not entirely free of clichés and also somewhat flattening dramaturgically towards the end, The Boy with the Bicycle is undoubtedly engagingly staged acting cinema. But the emotional power that is actually inherent in the story is unfortunately drastically diminished by the striving for undercooled realism. Arthouse lovers will certainly not regret seeing this film due to Thomas Doret's convincing performance. But due to its very dominant weak points, the drama is unfortunately not unreservedly recommendable

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp