This weekend I read 'The Story of Lucy Gault' by William Trevor, a stunningly brilliant novel (Amazon review forthcoming) and saw 'The Kid with the Bike' (review below).
The film is directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and tells the story of Cyril (Thomas Doret), an 11-year old stuck in the care system; his mother is absent and his father is irresponsible. Wild, hard and intense, Cyril spends most of the film in motion, running, climbing, cycling. At first his frantic search for love gets him nowhere: his father is dismissive and wants nothing to do with him, more interested in prepping a restaurant kitchen than his desperate son. But everything changes when he runs into Samantha (Cecile de France), a hair-dresser and child-free earth mother.
The atmosphere of a grotty Belgian town permeates everything. Doret is brilliant and reminds me of Billy (David Bradley) in Ken Loach's 'Kes'.' But the massive hole at the centre of the story is the lack of either characterization or motivation in Samantha. Who - for reasons unknown - becomes his foster mother.
Now, this film gets 96 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes and won the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival and you may say all those earnest cineastes can't be wrong, and the Telegraph says this:
'A mainstream film would have distracted us with a spurious backstory about Samantha's own deprived childhood, or whatever – 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.'
But I say, give me a story I can believe in, no matter how pared down you want to be. A single woman who suddenly decides to take in a semi-delinquent boy every weekend needs a back story of some kind, or a front story, or something. Establishing motivation isn't a sign of mediocrity. And it can be succinctly or symbolically done.
There's a touch of emperor's new clothes about critics refusing to criticise the Dardenne brothers for the fundamental implausibility of their narrative. Perhaps their aim was to emulate the likes of Tarkovsky or Bresson, but the films the old school auteurs made had a sense of folk-tale or universality about them that this film fails to communicate.
(Just did some online research and apparently the directors did intend it to be a 'fairy tale' so there you go. Samantha is supposed to be the fairy godmother. For me, though, simply stating that something is your intention doesn't mean that you succeed in achieving it.)
