Cyril (newcomer Thomas Doret) is determined to reconnect with his father in THE KID WITH A BIKE
THE KID WITH A BIKE (LE GAMIN AU VÉLO) (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2011)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, March 16
212-924-7771
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Cannes favorites Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have been making critically hailed naturalistic films for more than thirty years, including such Palme d’Or winners as Rosetta (1999) and L’Enfant (2005). The Belgian brothers’ latest, the exquisitely told The Kid with a Bike, shared the 2011 Grand Prix with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. In The Kid with a Bike, thirteen-year-old newcomer Thomas Doret makes a mesmerizing acting debut as Cyril, a young boy who refuses to accept that the father (Jérémie Renier) he worships has abandoned him. While running away from the children’s home he has been sent to, he winds up in the arms of hairdresser Samantha (Cécile de France), who feels an instant connection with Cyril and agrees to take him in on weekends. But Cyril only wants his father and is soon rebelling by hanging out with an older boy known as Dealer (Egon Di Mateo), the leader of a gang of local toughs who recruits Cyril to do a little job for him. Desperate for a father figure, Cyril agrees, with severe consequences. The Dardennes (La promesse, Lorna’s Silence) had the cast rehearse on-set and in costume for a month, which gives the film a deeply realistic feel. Shooting in the summer for the first time, the Dardennes concentrate on three primary locations: the city, where Cyril keeps searching for his father and gets his bike stolen; a forest that threatens physical danger; and a gas station where the plot subtly shifts. Evoking Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 Italian neo-Realist masterpiece The Bicycle Thief and Shane Meadows’s gritty 2006 British drama This Is England, both of which feature extraordinary performances by first-time child actors, The Kid with a Bike is a bittersweet, involving tale of family and belonging in which children and adults are seemingly always at cross-purposes, with Samantha serving as a kind of bridge to heal the fracture. De France is wonderful as Samantha, her muscular, bare arms enveloping Cyril, trying to protect him from a world that has already crushed his hopes and dreams. And Doret is captivating as the troubled Cyril, his eyes filled with heart-wrenching passion and yearning, trying to find a place to fit in and be wanted. The Kid with a Bike is another special film from two brothers who once again share their unique, thoughtful, intelligent view of family.
Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo returned to the New York Film Festival for the fifth time with Night and Day, a character-driven tale about displacement and loneliness. Youngho Kim stars as Sungam, a married painter in his forties who flees South Korea for France after having been turned in for smoking marijuana with U.S. tourists. A fish out of water in Paris, he settles into a Korean neighborhood, spending most of his time with two young art students, Yujeong (Eunhye Park) and Hyunju (Minjeong Seo). He also meets an old girlfriend, Minsun (Youjin Kim), who is still attracted to him. And every night he calls his wife, Sungin (Sujung Hwang), wondering when he’ll be able to return home. Hong (Woman Is the Future of Man, Tale of Cinema) tells the story in a diary-like manner, with interstitials acting like calendar pages. Sometimes a day can be filled with talk of art, a party, and a chance encounter, while others can consist of a brief, random event with no real bearing on the plot, reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, just without the existential cynicism and dark humor. As with 2006’s Woman on the Beach, Hong lets Night and Day go on too long (it clocks in at 141 minutes), with too many inconsequential (even if entertaining) vignettes, but it’s so much fun watching Youngho’s compelling performance that you just might not care about the length. Night and Day is screening March 18 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s retrospective of Hong’s work, which also includes Like You Know It All, Woman on the Beach, Oki’s Movie, and The Day a Pig Fell into the Well.
There’s nothing abstract about the title of Corinna Belz’s documentary on German artist Gerhard Richter, no missing words or punctuation marks. Gerhard Richter Painting is primarily just that: Ninety-seven minutes of Gerhard Richter painting as he prepares for several exhibitions, including a 2009 show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York City. In 2007, Belz got a rare chance to capture Richter on camera, making a short film focusing on the stained-glass window he designed for the Cologne Cathedral. Two years later, the shy, reserved German artist, who prefers to have his art speak for itself, invited Belz into his studio, giving her remarkable access inside his creative process, which revealingly relies so much on chance and accident. Belz films Richter as he works on two large-scale canvases on which he first slathers yellow paint, adds other colors, then takes a large squeegee and drags it across the surface, changing everything. It’s fascinating to watch Richter study the pieces, never quite knowing when they are done, unsure of whether they are any good. It’s also painful to see him take what looks like an extraordinary painting and then run the squeegee over it yet again, destroying what he had in order to see if he can make it still better. “They do what they want,” he says of the paintings. “I planned something totally different.” About halfway through the film, a deeply concerned Richter starts regretting his decision to allow the camera into his studio. “It won’t work,” he says. “At the moment it seems hopeless. I don’t think I can do this, painting under observation. That’s the worst thing there is.” But continue he does, for Belz’s and our benefit. Belz (Life After Microsoft) even gets Richter to talk a little about his family while looking at some old photos, offering intriguing tidbits about his early life and his escape to Düsseldorf just before the Berlin Wall went up. Belz also includes clips from 1966 and 1976 interviews with Richter, and she attends a meeting he has with Goodman about his upcoming show, lending yet more insight into the rather eclectic artist. “To talk about painting is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too,” Richter, who turned eighty last month, says in the 1966 clip. However, watching Gerhard Richter Painting is far from pointless; Belz has made a compelling documentary about one of the great, most elusive artists of our time. “Man, this is fun,” Richter says at one point, and indeed it is; watching the masterful artist at work is, well, a whole lot more fun than watching paint dry. Gerhard Richter Painting opens on March 14 at Film Forum, with Yale School of Art dean Robert Storr introducing the 8:00 screening.