Among our great current filmmakers, count the Dardennes Brothers

There are many great young filmmakers at work across the world - getting critical acclaim and numerous prizes but not even close to the budgets or royalties that accrue to the giants of the U.S. screen with their too often overlong and tiresome big-budget projects - and among the greats Ithink anyone would have to put the Dardennes Brothers, of Belgium, at or near the top of the list. Their L'enfant was one of the great films of the past decade, and their newest, Kid with a Bike (Le gamin au velo) is another great film in their distinct narrative mode: tightly scripted stories of young people struggling to get by in the working-class cities on the France-Belgium border. In Kid with Bike, the main character is an early-teenage boy living in a group home and angry at the world because his father has more or less abandoned him. Story begins as kid tries to leave the home to go back to his father's apartment and reclaim his bike. His journey to his father's apartment ultimately reveals to him the painful truth that his father has no affection whatever for him, he's been abandoned. Though a very kind woman takes on the risk of being his weekend parent or guardian, the boy is still deeply troubled, as we see in scene after scene - very difficult for him to accept her love, or anyone's, and very difficult for him to welcome this challenging child. Part of the beauty of this dramatic film, aside from its realism of subject matter and its almost documentary approach to storytelling, is the edginess and ambiguity: there are never easy and sentimental solutions, as we would find in many American movies (and, to be fair, in European movies as well); and, as in all Dardennes films, I think, the ending is a little bit jarring and unresolved and open - thought the episode itself is drawn through an arc to a natural conclusion, it's obvious to all of us that these are not the end of the problems for this boy and his adoptive mother - that he has been scarred by his father, by his time in the group home, by the cruelty of the world in which he has just barely managed to survive, and there will be many trials ahead for him and for all who know him. The Dardennes films are like a contemporary, somewhat darker version of the early Truffault films - and it will be interesting to see if they "grow" some of their characters through time that way he did through 500 Blows and beyond.