Precarity, Liminality, mobility: childhood in the cinema of the Dardenne Brothers

ABSTRACT

Using the work of Pamela Robertson Wojcik, this article positions the Dardennes treamtment of the child as an example of ‘slow death cinema’ (Robertson Wojcik, 2021) an exntesion of Laurent Berlant’s conception of the ‘slow death’ (2007). In these films children are not orientated towards a hopeful and socially mobile conception of adulthood but rather left to explore the micro-borders of Searaing, moving through and engaging with this depressed geography without ever transcending, leaving or developing beyond it. These children are representative of a ‘perpetual motion in place’ (Robertson Wojcik, 2021), in that they move constantly - on bikes, trains, busses, cars and motorbikes - but never leave. Whilst there may be some moments of moral or interpersonal development, children within the films of the Dardennes are an expression of an ultimaltely ambigious rather than a hopeful future. This article argues that this physichal precarity and immobility is tied to questions of class and inequality and is expressed as an aspect of the Dardennes aestehtic approach. It suggests that whilst, the Dardennes largely avoid explicit investigations of the stystems that underpin social-inequality they explore these themes most productively in their use of the ‘immobile’ child.

KEYWORDS:

• Dardenne
• childhood
• precarity
• movement
• European Cinema

In a career spanning nearly fifty-years the Dardenne Brothers have produced scrupulously constructed and politically inflected cinema that engages with lives lived on the edge of society. Occupying a uniquely privileged position in European art-cinema the Dardennes are auteurs whose films garner almost universal critical acclaim whilst enjoying relative financial success. They are, as Martin O’Shaughnessy has suggested, leading European arthouse directors whose names attract money to films, promote film festivals, fill cinemas and sell DVDs and video on demand (O’Shaughnessy 2020, 133). They are also formally and politically conscious filmmakers whose work, in its setting and subject matter, endeavours to explore the lives of working-class people struggling to survive in the context of a post-Fordist economy and an increasingly fractured European Union.

Emerging from the European tradition of realist and neo-realist cinema, the Dardennes work is the product of serious meditative reflection, as evidenced in Luc Dardenne’s On The Back of Our Images (Dardenne, 2019), and a distinctly moral and deceptively uncomplicated aesthetic. In reflecting on these aesthetic and narrative preoccupations Phillip Mosley acknowledges the relative debt owed by the brothers to post-war realist filmmakers, suggesting the Dardennes

As European auteurs … owe much in content and form to an auteurist cinematic tradition that includes French poetic realism of the 1930s and especially Italian neo-realism of the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Mosley 2013, 13)

In this post-war moment, to which the Dardennes are so indebted, emerge films like Somewhere in Berlin (Lamprecht, 1946), Hue and Cry (Crichton, 1947), and Bicycle Thieves (Di Sica, 1948). All of which observe young boys navigating landscapes of devastation and post-war reconstruction, with the success of these traversals often ‘proof’ of an enduring national spirit and the possibility of a better future. A similar comparison can be drawn between the Dardennes work and that of British social realist directors such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh who have produced equally acclaimed work in comparable economic and artistic contexts. Notably, the Dardennes contributed co-production efforts on Loach’s latest film, The Old Oak (Loach, 2023), which considers the impact the arrival of Syrian refugees has on a fading mining town in North-East England. The brothers most recent directorial effort Tori and Lokita (2021), which is discussed in detail later, is similarly concerned with movement and migration – in particular the experiences of a surrogate brother and sister, eleven-year-old Tori and sixteen-year-old Lokita, who leave Benin in the hope of a better life within the EU.

Loach’s Kes (1969) and Sweet Sixteen (2002) Lynn Ramsey’s Ratcatcher (1999) and Celine Sciamma’s Girlhood (2014) offer other pan-European examples of films that deal with economic inequality, alienated labour and gender via the experiences of the child and adolescent. Unifying these narratives of childhood and adolescents is a focus on movement, mobility and liminality, with the capacity of the child and adolescent to travel through and between the literal and emotional geographies of their political, economic and interpersonal experiences acting as the pivot around which the narrative and its subsequent critical assessments are organised. These movements are varied. The child moves and is moved, is compelled to escape, run away or hide, is forced to find innovative ways to travel, is trafficked or transported. As Karen Lury has argued such expressions of mobility combined with the intermediate nature of childhood are often read critically as synonymous with metaphors of ‘becoming’ and ‘growth’ in a manner that unhelpfully privileges normative and universalised notions of development and encourages an over-investment in and fetishization of the child as a figure of potential (Lury 2022). However, and as Lury suggests, it is also possible to understand the child’s movement and mobility as ontological inflected in that it becomes an expression of their unique engagement with the world and constitutive of their being. In the context of A Time For Drunken Horses (Ghobadi, 2000) and Turtles Can Fly (Ghobadi, 2004) – two examples of New Iranian Cinema and through the work of Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Lury notes that mobility and journeying can be understood not as an extension of being but a condition of it and connected to the child’s experience of the world (Lury, 2010:289). In this context these movements are not innocent, pastoral and idealised but potentially repetitive, dangerous, boring and often futile. These children engage directly with both the landscape and the elements and make complex, monotonous, and often deleterious journeys.

These critical concerns coalesce in the cinema of the Dardennes which explores, via the child’s traversal of and engagement with the post-industrial setting of Seraing, the experiences of a disenfranchised and forgotten working class comprised of desperate adults and displaced children whose own movements and engagement with the city space becomes their ontology. In this context the child becomes a particularly vulnerable figure – with their elders absent or absorbed in their own struggle for survival. This, as R.D Crano observes, describes the furtive urbanism of the Dardennes cinema and the precarity with which their characters occupy everything from city spaces to social positions (Crano 2009, 3). As Crano argues this is achieved through a perpetuality of motion, with both the camera and the characters never stopping. For Crano the Dardennes privilege an aesthetic of affect rather than intelligibility and achieve this via camera movement, shot duration, framing and proximity. In this, their work remains ‘open’ and encourages a form of spectatorial comprehension that precedes any overt knowledge of the given diegetic situation (Crano 2009). Within the diegesis this affective aesthetic is manifested via a disruptive engagement with the urban environment and a complex appropriation of marginal, dangerous or forgotten spaces. Similarly, Philip Mosley – through the work of Marshall Berman who identifies the city dweller as a figure who must adapt to this potentially threatening space, argues that characters within the Dardennes work embody a form of streetwise mobility. This urban resistance sees characters operating against the grain of the urban space and its high-way dominated system, to work the streets smartly and to their advantage (Mosely, 2013:16). Like Lury, Crano and Mosley are both interested in a haptic interpretation of character movement that describes the ways in which the Dardennes proximal, mobile camera and the ‘journeying’ undertaken by their characters comes to reflect the nomadic and precarious social positions occupied by these individuals. Both describe the sensual and affective potential of the Dardennes work and acknowledge the brothers frequent obfuscation of intelligibility and the importance of fluidity and unrest within their approach. In this, and as Mosley argues, ‘By concentrating on their protagonists everyday physical experiences they embed a social analysis implicitly within their dramas of individual lives’ (Mosley 2013, 13).

With these concerns in mind, this article triangulates the work of Lauren Berlant, Pamela Robertson Wojcik and the Dardennes, to particularises these readings of the brothers mobile cinema around the untethered child and adolescent. I argue that the journeys and movements of the child around the post-industrial setting of Seraing is perhaps the essential element of the moral, philosophical and political critique embedded in the Dardennes cinema and that this reading teases out new interpretation of the director’s work. In doing this, I evoke Pamela Robertson Wojcik’s concept of ‘slow death cinema’ (Robertson Wojcik 2021) an extension of Laurent Berlant’s conception of the ‘slow death’ (Berlant 2007). In slow death cinema children and adolescents are not orientated towards a hopeful and socially mobile conception of adulthood but rather left to explore the micro-borders of Seraing and Liege, moving through and engaging with this depressed geography without ever transcending, leaving or developing beyond it. These children are representative of a ‘perpetual motion in place’ (Robertson Wojcik 2021), in that they move constantly – on bikes, trains, busses, cars and motorbikes – but never leave and come to express an ultimately ambiguous rather than a hopeful future. They are also expressive of the restless and cyclical status of the child within cinematic treatments of the global working-class, with Kore-eda’s Shoplifters (2018) and Alphonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) other recent example of the child’s constantly moving (or moved) status in the context of a precarious and depersonalised economic system that cares little for the individual. As Robertson Wojcik argues slow death cinema is not a cinema of tragedy. These are not film’s in which young people die or are killed through no fault of their own. Instead, rather than denying the individual a future through death, slow death cinema lacks faith in the future (Robertson Wojcik 2021). With reference to The Kid with the Bike (2011) and Tori and Lokita (2022) two of the Dardennes more recent films which focalise their narrative around the child and its movements, this article argues that within the cinema of the Dardennes questions of inequality, uncertainty and precarity are tied to a complex collage of images of mobility and immobility and expressed as an aspect of the Dardennes rigorous aesthetic approach via camera movement, proximity, editing, place and space. In this, the Dardennes children are displaced, chased, sold, fugitive figures who navigate the geography of Seraing and Liege in the shadow of starkly or ambiguously rendered futures.

Many of the ‘child’ figures within the work of the Dardennes can just as accurately be described as adolescents, teens or young adults. Whilst the use of the word child stretches these critical categories it also questions the utility and permeability of these boundaries and reinforces the oscillatory relationship between childhood and adulthood that much of the Dardennes work expresses. As Alexandra Lloyd has argued in her attempt to critically evaluate the deployment of children and young people in the cinema of another European auteur, Michael Haneke,

What is at issue is not a clear-cut distinction, but rather a complex web of associations and references. Just as a child does not automatically become an adolescent overnight on reaching the age of thirteen, so the figures in Haneke’s films are frequently framed in a much more protean and dynamic way. (Lloyd 2016, 184)

This article employs a similar rational. Movement across and between the borders of age and developmental stage has a key critical value as it articulates another form of bounded mobility. The older characters depicted in the cinema of the Dardennes frequently oscillate, often rapidly, between subject positions, functioning as maternal or paternal figures, siblings, carers or moral guardians – with these roles often discarded, replaced or rejected – suggesting an impermanence and an ideological refusal of vertical growth towards ‘proper’ and fulfilling adulthood. This oscillation also underpins the ultimately untethered existence of these child/adolescent characters and offers another means through which their precarity is expressed, with the relative safety of child status frequently unavailable to them in any consistent way. As Laurent Berlant has argued the volatility of the category ‘child’ within the Dardennes work is an index of the complexity inherent in describing any body in the flux of impoverished survival habits that constitute existence in the contemporary economy (Berlant 2011). The fluctuation between child, adolescent and adult and between stability and instability is perhaps further evidenced in the internal logic of the Dardennes oeuvre, which makes it possible to draw connections between characters and actors as they operate throughout the diegetic world and within the geography of Seraing. It is possible to suggest that some of the children depicted in the Dardennes earlier films may reappear as adults in their later work – their subsequent social position and attitudes towards their ‘own’ children becoming a tacit affirmation of the circular and cyclical nature of existence posited within the Dardennes canon. The word ‘child’, then, is used to describe a permeable and transitory space which is moved into and out of. This restless aesthetic becomes structuring within the Dardennes cinema – moving beyond simply depicting the directionless movement of children and adolescents within the diegesis to, instead, make movement and uncertainty a distinct element of their politics.

Slow Death/Cinema

Berlant’s conception of ‘slow death’ is concerned with the ‘physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence’ (Berlant 2007, 754). Berlant is interested in the ways in which contemporary capitalist structures encourage the strategic positioning of certain individuals and social groups – in Berlant’s example, the obese – as ‘embodied liabilities’ (Berlant 2007, 765), those individuals who are perceived to be less competent at maintaining health and therefore failing in their ‘responsibilities’ as productive citizens. Through the work of Michel Foucault, Berlant argues,

Biopower operates when a hegemonic bloc organises the reproduction of life in ways that allow political crises to be cast as conditions of specific bodies and their competence at maintaining health or other conditions of social belonging; thus the bloc gets to judge the problematic body’s subjects, whose agency is deemed to be fundamentally destructive. Apartheid like structures, from zoning to shaming, are wielded against these populations. (Berlant 2007, 765)

Fundamentally, Berlant suggests that by making abject those bodies that do not, cannot, or will not contribute to the maintenance of a neo-liberal capitalist system those same bodies can be denounced as an impediment to progress. The political frameworks that caused their attenuation are then concealed behind what Maebh Long calls ‘a rhetoric of failed personal responsibility, which is used to legitimate judgement and intervention’ (Long 2015, 93).

Robertson Wojcik’s argues that the notion of the slow death can be usefully appropriated to describe a cycle of films concerned with representing what has come to be called the precariat. An intersectional class of people who have no ladders of mobility to climb and are situated on the periphery of contemporary society. At the centre of this is the largest youth cohort in history, a group that is struggling to secure livelihoods in the most dismal labour market since the Great Depression (Robertson Wojcik 2021, 111–112). If Berlant’s notion of slow death seeks to describe ongoing experiences of personal difficulty, feelings of exhaustion, social decay and a fundamental lack of futurity, for Robertson Wojcik these same experiences are registered and reflected via slow death cinema in its acknowledgment of the present-day precarity of youth (Robertson Wojcik, 2021:116). Robertson Wojcik argues slow death cinema might feature characters marginalised by their youth, class, race, ethnicity or sexuality who operate on the fringes of society – working itinerantly, or outside of the law as prostitutes, gamblers and hustlers. These films are often shot on location, in geographies associated with poor or underclass communities and feature a combination of professional and non-professional actors. Rarely are these narratives comedic and the structure of these films is often episodic or organised around a distinct time-period, taking place over a day or across the course of a single evening (Robertson Wojcik 2021). Essential to Robertson Wojcik’s argument is the idea that notions of normative growth and development within traditional ‘teen’ films link to a geographic mobility and the capacity for the individual to leave home and climb the social ladder (Robertson Wojcik 2021). Increasingly, within these texts mobility has been figured as an expression of precarity – a hyper-mobility or perpetual motion in place which sees character moving and being moved but never going anywhere.

The mobility experienced by the child and adolescent characters within these narratives is not simply defined by their (in)ability to move or their means of movement, but instead by those structures that inhibit or encourage movement away from and out of economic and social deprivation. Rootless instability may be one expression of mobility within these narratives as may the constant movement between repetitious locals. A workplace, a temporary home, a bar or social club. Cars are rarely used, with public transport, trains, buses, bicycles, and mopeds the preferred or perhaps only available means or movement. Aesthetically, these movements are underpinned by long and often silent images of travel, or alternatively deliberately edited images that articulate duration and monotony. In redeploying Berlant’s work Robertson Wojcik considers slow-death cinema in the context of American Independent film and pays particular attention to a cycle of films, including Lean on Pete (Haigh, 2018), American Honey (Arnold, 2016) and Gimme the Loot (Leon, 2013) concerned with marginalised individuals who are moved and are moving on the fringes of society.

Berlant’s own work considers the implications of both cruel optimism and the slow death in the context of cinema by analysing these concepts in relation to the work of the Dardennes – cinema which engages similarly sympathetic representations of worn down or worn-out children and adolescents. These individuals are characterised by a constant and often inherited struggle to find gainful employment and fulfilling interpersonal relationships and this is expressed via oscillatory movements within the liminal geography of Liege and Searing. In her analysis of Rosetta (1999) – in which the teenage Rosetta searches fruitlessly for work to support herself and her alcoholic mother and The Promise (1996), which follows fifteen-year-old Igor who must cover up the death of Amadou, a migrant worker employed illegally by Igor’s unscrupulous father – Berlant expresses the cruelty of normative optimism through the child’s desire to live a ‘normal’ life. For Berlant these films describe the impossibility of belonging within an increasingly globalised economy and the thwarted desire to earn a legitimate space in the world through both productive work and a fantasy of a normative home life (Berlant 2011). Both readings engage with ideas of precarity, labour and age and consider how a youth underclass might construct social structures in which they can belong in the context of an increasingly alienated labour market and a generationally fractured home life. In extending the work of Berlant and Robertson Wojcik my reading suggests that within the cinema of the Dardennes the mobility of the child and adolescent becomes ontological and the central means through which precarity, in a variety of forms, is displayed. These individuals are placed both on the fringes of the labour market and of traditional familial structures and move restlessly between the city’s spaces on bikes, on busses, on mopeds, on foot and in cars in search of belonging.

Whilst the brothers hyper-mobile camera and preoccupation with cyclical journeys and movements functions as a key aspect of their aesthetic and social critique, their determined return to the post-industrial cities of Liege and Seraing, locations that are descriptive of precarity, instability and decline further underpin a profound sense of inescapability and repetition. These geographies are, as Dillet and Puri argue, riddled with interstices, the spaces that have been left when the surrounding resources – both industrial and domestic – have been depleted. The motorways, backstreets, forests, factories and bars that the protagonists inhabit are marginal spaces, they are on the outside both territorially and economically (Dillet and Puri 2016) and describe architecturally and geographically the attenuated state in which the Dardennes child and adolescent characters must live. We see exposed and decaying industrial piping looming over the Meuse River and the city as marked by the scars of economic decline. The aesthetic treatment of these locals form a central part of the Dardennes critical approach, in that these cities and their geographies come to act metonymically as a broader and more universal critique of capitalism. As Catherine Wheatley argues whilst Seraing is a specific place with a history and geography it is also ‘indeterminate’. Seraing remains a space unto itself, but also becomes descriptive of a certain kind of post-industrial and postsecular environment (Wheatley, 269:Wheatley 2019). In this formulation, Wheatly argues that Seraing can be understood as the physical embodiment of Gillian Rose’s ‘third-city’, a space that exists between the laws, legalism and democracy of ‘Athens’ and the pluralism of ‘Jerusalem’. Rose uses these figurative cities to acknowledge a philosophical turn from truth and law towards humanistic pluralism and utopianism and argues, instead, that we should remain in the space between these two termini, the third city. As Wheatley argues the third city is the city of right-now. Not simply a philosophical concept or a symbolic or metaphorical space, it is the city we inhabit and the arena in which the dramas of today are played out (Wheatley 2019). Importantly, Wheatley references Berlant and the concept of ‘mass but not collective activity’ (Berlant 2011, 166) in which the occupants of Seraing desperately compete for the diminishing opportunities available in the post-Fordist workspace.

As both a place of its own and indeterminate – Seraing I would suggest becomes palimpsestic, with the Dardennes reusing these geographies to compound the hyper-mobile precarity and cyclicality of their characters experiences by never totally making or erasing these spaces but rather by endlessly layering and complexifying their critique with the addition of new characters, narratives and locals. Wheatley argues, it is possible to understand Rosetta as a companion piece to the Dardenne’s 2014 film Two Days, One Night in which a young mother, Sandra, scrambles to reclaim her job after her co-workers opt for an employee bonus on the condition that they agree to make Sandra redundant. Going beyond narrative and thematic similarities, Jérémie Renier appears as fifteen-year-old Igor in The Promise, twenty-year-old Bruno in The Child and then as the middle-aged Guy in The Kid With the Bike. The child with a reckless criminal father, the reckless and criminal father who sells and then regains his child, and the worn-down middle-aged man attempting to extricate himself from his adolescent son to begin a new life. As Berlant argues,

‘It is as though the children, knowing nothing but the index of projected happiness, were compelled to repeat attachment to the very forms whose failure to secure the basic dignities of ordinary existence is central to the reproduction of the difficulty of their singular stories and lived struggle on the bottom class of society in the first place. (Berlant, 166–167:Berlant 2011)

Seraing and Liege compound these repetitions. As I will show, these narrative and ethical ties are underpinned aesthetically by the frequency with which the Dardennes employ images of their characters criss-crossing the streets of Seraing on push bikes, busses and mopeds – evading, alluding, searching and moving – the embodiment of perpetual motion in place. In this, the liminal palimpsestic spaces of Seraing and Liege which are continuously written and rewritten become a structuring metaphor in the expression and representation of the untethered and oscillatory experiences of the children and adolescents that populate the Dardennes cinema.

The kid with the bike

Twelve-year-old Cyril has been abandoned by his father at a Liege children’s home. Cyril escapes from school wishing to find his father, only to be told he has moved from the flat they once shared and cannot be located. When his social workers attempt to take him back to the children’s home Cyril grabs a passing woman, Samantha – who helps to calm him. Soon after, Samantha brings Cyril’s bike (which had previously been sold by his father) to the home and agrees to care for him at weekends. Samantha helps Cyril find his father who makes it clear he wants nothing to do with his son and that he wishes to start a new life. The film hinges on the child’s desire to restore the certainty of the home and the visualisation of the iterative and painful movements brought about by a life lived on the margins of society. It also extends the notion of slow death, hyper-mobility and precarity by locating its critique beyond the strictures of work and productive labour to suggest that Cyril is a victim of generational precarity. As the film evinces, Cyril’s father moves and leaves his son to take up low-paid work as a cook in a small café. Whilst Cyril, without parental guidance, becomes embroiled in the workings of a small-scale criminal enterprise populated by similarly untethered young people positioned precariously outside the family home.

Importantly, Cyril’s bike becomes the films key metaphorical component and its central expression of precarious and bounded movement. It articulates both the potential freedoms of childhood as well as its dangers, simultaneously expressing the joy Cyril finds in movement but also the frequently purgatorial journeying that characterises his experience. Aesthetically, the film remains determinedly focused on the apprehension and conceptualisation of the child’s movement within the frame. As Philip Mosley has suggested the Dardenne’s earlier work, as exemplified in Rosetta, relied on camera mobility, long takes and tight framing (Mosley 2013, 7). As Mosley goes on to acknowledge, the Dardenne’s later work becomes marked by a different set of artistic and aesthetic preoccupations defined by a more distanced and observational approach that reveals a greater spatial relationship between characters (Mosley 2013, 7). If the Dardennes earlier films such as The Promise and Rosetta, are defined by the camera’s proximal relationship with the body - The Kid With The Bike is aesthetically distantiated from the subject, favouring framings that work to articulate the child’s place within the landscape and in this engaging a formal methodology that describes, despite their often-frantic movement, the ultimate immobility of the child character. These formal choices locate Cyril within the palimpsest of Seraing, whilst also expressing the intensity and circuity of his journeying – frequently, the camera observes from a fixed position Cyril moving in to and then out of frame as he searches for his father. In this, the bicycle becomes a complex technology that both separates Cyril from the authority and indeterminacy described by the children’s home and provides an opportunity for independence, whilst also compounding his isolation and immobility via these images and sequences of fruitless, frustrated and delusive journeying.

As a deeply symbolic apparatus, the bicycle, in the context of the Dardennes work and its slow death potentialities becomes structuring in the film’s reflection on Cyril’s predicament through its embodiment of the complicated push and pull inherent in the child’s engagement with the bicycles liberating potentialities. As Bruce Bennett has argued,

The bicycle commonly functions as a moving sign of the complex relationship between father and son. The primal scene of the child learning to ride is symbolically powerful both because it marks the irreparable separation of parent and child, which takes place as children age, and because it stages – and thereby reveals – the emotional distance and fear of intimacy that characterises conventional masculinity. In other words, the bicycle comes to symbolise not so much the close relationship between father and son but its absence – a nostalgic desire for an intimacy that was never available. (Bennett 2019, 142)

In this, rather than an apparatus of freedom and an expression of Cyril’s nascent entry into the world of adulthood, the bicycle comes to symbolise his father’s rejection and Cyril’s continued movement in place. In describing this inhibited and apprehended movement and the structuring absence of the father the Dardennes employ an aesthetic approach that seemingly pre-empts and therefore magnifies Cyril’s rootless and circular engagement with Seraing. Notably, the expressive potential of the bike is revisited throughout the film. For example, we see a despondent Cyril hiding in bed, unwilling to meet with the director of the children’s home who wishes to discuss his conduct. He is wrapped in covers decorated with images of motocross riders and cyclist in a variety of dynamic poses. With his body hidden Cyril writhes and turns, tying himself up in a twisted bundle of bed clothes – an external expression of Cyril’s internal tumult – and an ironic reference to Cyril’s thwarted movements.

Unwilling and unable to trust the selfless maternalism of Samantha, Cyril attaches himself to small-time crook Wesker. 17-year-old Wesker, the films nominal antagonist, is another example of the illicit economies that marginalised adolescent and teen characters participate in within the context of Seraing and Liege. A small-time drug dealer, Wesker leads a gang of lost boys who loiter around the working-class housing estate on which Samantha’s hair salon is located. Drawing Cyril in with promises of kinship and brotherhood Wesker embodies the substitutional relations that describe character interaction within the Dardennes cinema, with child and adolescent characters forced to find alternative and frequently inferior forms of familial connection. Notably, Wesker lives with his elderly grandparents, his grandmother is bed bound, and it is implied that his grandfather has an alcohol abuse issue. The tacit omission of Wesker’s own mother and father again points towards both the prominence and ordinariness of alternatively organised family units and evinces a desire, within both Wesker and Cyril, for surrogate father and son relations. Importantly, Wesker and Cyril meet after one of Wesker’s gang steals and then breaks Cyril’s bike. Impressed by Cyril’s tenacity in recovering the stolen bike and his willingness to fight the boys that took it, Wesker nicknames Cyril ‘Pitbull’ and pays for his bike to be fixed at a local garage. This is both an act of brotherly/fatherly care but also at attempt to manipulate and ingratiate Cyril.

Wesker convinces Cyril to violently assault the local postmaster and to steal money from him. After beating the man and his son and taking the money from them, Cyril escapes at high speed in a panicked Wesker’s car. Abandoned by Wesker and left stranded, Cyril runs to the gang’s hideout and recovers his bike, before riding and then travelling by bus to hand the stolen money to his father in the hope of buying his affection. His father refuses the money and Cyril is left to cycle back to Samantha in the hope that she may forgive him. As Crano has suggested the Dardennes penchant for vehicular tracking shots borders on obsession (Crano 2009, 8) and reoccurs as a constitutive aesthetic element in all their films. In The Kid with the Bike the sequence in which Cyril travels back to Samantha is described by a striking tracking shot which lasts for nearly 90 seconds and observes, silently, as Cyril cycles at night through the streets of Seraing. This is not, however, an empowered movement that speaks to an unactualized nomadic potential (Crano 2009) but rather a final and desperate attempt to move into a space orientated towards futurity rather than despair.

As Martin O’Shaughnessy has suggested, The Kid with the Bike presents a more hopeful vision of the child’s future – certainly the films ending is more tacitly optimistic than either Rosetta or The Promise which are, at best, ambiguously concluded. O’Shaughnessy has suggested by the end of the film and thanks to Samantha’s kindness and commitment the Cyril who rides his bike ‘is no longer the vulnerable abandoned child who clung to Samantha’s body but a young man who can move confidently through the world and engage in contact with others’ (O’Shaughnessy 2020, 56). Perhaps, although the films climax is more uncertain than this reading suggests. As Cyril buys Barbecue coals from a local petrol station he is met by the postmaster and his son. Accosted by the teenage son Cyril flees into nearby woods and climbs a tree to escape. The Son throws stones at Cyril, with one hitting him on the head and knocking him from the tree. Cyril lies motionless on the floor as the postmaster and his son discuss what to do with the body. As they talk, Cyril regains consciousness, refuses an ambulance and then rides away on his bike. The camera observes as Cyril passes around a corner that leads to rows of suburban homes – and out of shot. Certainly, Cyril travels towards a potentially more hopeful future, but his journey remains uncertain.

In many respects, the ending of The Kid with the Bike recalls the uncertain future faced by Igor in The Promise. After fleeing from his father and escorting Amadou’s widow Assita to the station Igor is unable to let her board the train without revealing the truth about her husband. Located in the liminal space of the station’s underpass, Assita begins to climb the stairs to the platform – before Igor, located outside of the frame, reveals that Hamidou fell from scaffolding and died and that his father compelled him to keep the accident a secret rather than seek medical help. Wordlessly and with her infant child on her back, Assita turns and begins to walk away, before looking at Igor. The camera, now framing Igor, watches as Assita walks out of shot and back through the underpass. The camera pans in one movement from left to right as Igor chases her, reaching Assita’s side he begins to walk with her, the camera observing the pair as they move away and out of frame. Whilst the climax suggests some sense of moral and personal development, it maintains an overwhelming sense of stasis – both The Promise and The Kid with the Bike describe a moral and ethical engagement on the part of the child and in this exists the potential for emotional and spiritual growth, but these are texts without end – the continued diegetic sound of the train station played over the black screen after the film’s final cut articulating a continued movement. And whilst Cyril cycles towards the relative safety of Samantha’s home and through a suburban, rather than an industrial milieu, he does so marked literally and metaphorical by his experiences. Badly bruised, muddied and bleeding, Cyril cycles impassively out of the frame towards an ultimately unknown future. There is no closure here, a fundamental feature of slow death cinema which ultimately describes a mobility that is without terminus.

Tori and Lokita

By way of conclusion, I wish to look at Tori and Lokita (2022) – a film that deals directly with issues of journeying and migration and thinks specifically about the precarity of migrant children and the frequently involuntary movements they suffer. Opening out and extending the idea of slow death cinema so far discussed, Tori and Lokita makes the movement of the child its implicit focus and allows for the existence of the precariat class to be explored on a more self-consciously global scale. Tori and Lokita are child migrants who have travelled, separately, from West Africa to Belgium. They live together in a children’s home for displaced peoples and work for a local restaurateur, Betim, selling drugs – the only economy they can participate in because of their ‘illegal’ and undocumented status. Unable to secure citizenship legally, Lokita is forced to work growing cannabis for Betim and his partner Luckas in exchange for citizenship papers. Hiding in Betim’s car, Tori travels to the remote grow-house to visit Lokita – they conspire to steel some of the cannabis and to sell it to send money to Lokita’s mother and pay off the people traffickers who brought them to Europe. Tori and Lokita are discovered and chased – Lokita is caught whilst attempting to flag down a car and shot dead by Luckas. Tori hides, only to find Lokita’s body after Luckas has left. The film ends with Tori reading a short eulogy describing what their life might have looked like and stating that after Lokita’s murder he is now alone. The film, like The Promise, Lorna’s Silence (2008), The Unknown Girl (2016) and Young Ahmed (2019) deals with migration and displacement whilst exploring the uniquely marginalised and Othered social position of the economic or forced migrant and refugee. Here, the Dardennes reflect upon the bureaucratic systems that inhibit legal movement between countries whilst also highlighting the dangerous and unscrupulous ways in which other marginal figures such as drug dealers and people traffickers employ vulnerable children through intimidation and coercion.

The Dardennes forgo a direct aesthetic engagement with Tori and Lokita’s first journey between West Africa and Europe. Instead, the nature of these experiences is alluded to, with Lokita noting that she and Tori began pretending to be siblings on arrival in Italy. However, this act of displacement is substantive within the narrative which uses the cyclical and fruitless movement between marginal, liminal places and spaces within the city of Searing as a synecdoche of Tori and Lokita’s initial journey. These children travel almost exclusively at night, dealing drugs on street corners and moving via side streets and alleyways to evade detection by the authorities. These undocumented children exist in increasingly precarious material conditions with only a thin veneer of protection afforded by the state. When Lokita is moved to the grow house, her and Luckas travel at night and Lokita is blindfolded. When Tori makes the journey, he stows away in the back of Betim’s car, hiding in the footwell. Dangerous and clandestine, these journeys are reminiscent of the first journey made by Tori and Lokita – treacherous but imbued with the promise of opportunity and freedom whilst ultimately only serving to locate both children even more thoroughly in geographies of precarity and stasis. The bicycle is also redeployed by the Dardennes as an instrument of both mobility and immobility. When Tori borrows a bike from the children’s home to make his daily activities easier his journeying instead becomes even more frenetic and exhausting. He cycles to visit Lokita in the grow house, to deliver drugs and to avoid Firmin, the people trafficker to whom he owes money. Rather than an expression of freedom, the bike – as in The Kid with the Bike - becomes a deeply metaphorical object that reasserts the quietly desperate and cyclical nature of Tori’s experiences.

Whilst slow-death cinema rarely results in the literal killing of the child, Tori and Lokita eschews this and we watch as Lokita is shot by Luckas. This, in part, precludes the ambiguous ending that characterises much of the Dardennes work and slow death cinema more broadly. It also magnifies the uncertainty of Tori’s future – his ersatz sister has been killed and now he is, as he states, truly alone. In this, the Dardennes articulate, again, a particularly harsh vision of contemporary Europe – a perspective that has been rehearsed throughout their oeuvre but perhaps takes on new meaning in the context of a disintegrating European Union, growing economic disparity and increasingly brutal policies that seek to criminalise and detain vulnerable migrant peoples. In this context, the migrant child extends ideas of slow death cinema and the slow death. If slow death cinema is defined by precariously placed children and adolescents who move (and are forced to move) without terminus and slow death the mass physical attenuation of peoples under global regimes of capitalist structural subordination (Berlant 2007) then the migrant, in the work of the Dardennes, becomes the apotheosis of this as both the ultimate expression of deleterious movement without end and a figure physically worn down, even extinguished, by their status as non-citizens and their separation from family structures. All of this is again, compounded by the liminal and palimpsestic spaces of Liege and Seraing that, at the very least, encourages one to consider the possibility that these narratives may intertwine or overlap. We can perhaps imagine Tori and Cyril passing each other on their bikes as they make their own individual clandestine and desperate journeys around the city.

In describing the politics of Lorna’s Silence (2008) – another of the Dardennes films in which the central character is a precariously placed migrant, and its attitudes towards issues of migration and the ‘migrant’ more broadly, Jean-Paul Dardenne argues,

They want to have better lives. One of the characteristics of the past twenty years is this enormous change in the idea of Western Europe. A lot of people are coming and trying to find a place, but it is not going to be very easy – there is this fortress mentality of the old Europe. This is really the most important challenge for Europe now: How do we incorporate those migrations, find a place for these groups of people so that they can contribute towards developing the wealth of Europe. (Jean-Paul Dardenne in Cardullo 2010, 191–192)

If slow death cinema is concerned with the peregrinations of child and adolescent characters confined by economics and social class to make, continuously, the same journeys across the same geographies in hope of survival, then Tori and Lokita describes these movements and negotiations in the context of the European Union’s own confrontation with migration and movement. In this it extends and complexifies the issues already raised in this article whilst reasserting Seraing and Liege’s capacity to scaffold these investigations via their existence as both a distinct geography that embodies an economic history and a present day precarity but also a space consisting of dislocated locals stitched together to form an abstract and interstitial patchwork that embodies the ultimate disconnectedness of these itinerant children.

Conclusion

The Dardennes are exacting in their unwillingness to offer a solution to the issues confronted by these mobile children and adolescents. Whilst their work remains resolutely political, they refuse to provide these children with a way out of the circumstances in which they are found. In one respect the moral and ethical lessons that are learned point towards the child’s inherent potential. In another, the figurative line that can be drawn between the adults and children that emerge across the Dardennes work describes the circuity, precarity and impermanence of constant motion in place. Even in the fairy-tale milieu of The Kid with the Bike, Cyril cycles into a complex and potentially painful future – and whilst the climax is decidedly more hopeful than Rosetta’s, Igor’s, Lokita’s or Tori’s, the same issues persists. In all these examples movement and motion are key elements of the plot and the aesthetic. Walking through the Seraing streets, bus journeys, car rides, the precariousness of the moped, and the furious peddling of push bikes all describe the desperate attempts of these characters to move through and away from their circumstances whilst ultimately remaining rootless and restless. Within Seraing, these children and adolescents continue their journeys whilst staging and expressing the often-unforgiving attitude that articulates their relationship with the state. As Robertson Wojcik argues,

These films show characters as unhomed and disorientated towards the future, and taken together they point to a suddenly large and mobile populace whose stories underscore the limits of social mobility. (Robertson Wojcik, 2018:123)

These themes exist throughout the Dardennes work with both The Child, The Son and Young Ahmed offering other poignant examples of precarity, and describing modes of mobility that do not orientate children and adolescents towards hopeful conceptions of the future and of adulthood. Fundamentally, the Dardennes is a cinema that is less concerned with what might happen to these characters, their open textual approach encouraging alternative and differentiated readings that ask the spectator to think beyond the end of the frame and the film. In this, the Dardennes seek to explore the implications of the movements made and the journeys taken by these children. As they discussed in an interview with Variety magazines Peter Debruge,

For us a strong film character is someone who’s a prisoner, but they fight. He or she doesn’t know what they are up against, but they’re trying to change something … They are people who are in movement and we film their movement. (Dardenne & Dardenne in Debruge 2023)

These children and adolescents exist as prisoners – trapped but in search of escape and the opportunity to move. This desire for permanency and place is perhaps the key metaphor through which ideas of social immobility in the context of domestic and supranational political structures might be explored and in this the child becomes the figure around these moral, aesthetic and ethical explorations might take place.

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Matthew Smith

Matthew Smith has previously taught at the Universities of Lancaster and Liverpool. He is currently lecturer in media, film & television at Edge Hill University.