I am now wondering which one of these two films I should see first: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Clear, based on a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, or The Kid With a Bike, a French film directed by the Dardenne brothers.
Both seem to be about a similar quest--a boy's search for his father. In Extremely Loud, the boy's pursuit is that of a figment of a paternal figure who has been blown away by the 9/11 explosion. The son takes time for the truth of the father's sudden demise to sink in, and the movie, I hear, is about his frantic movements through Manhattan, aboard his skateboard.
The Kid is about a boy whose father is living but refuses to take care of him and so he puts him in the hands of kind strangers. The boy does not believe this; he thinks his father is momentarily away on business and one day will come to collect him and father and son would live happily ever after. He rides frantically on his bike, as though he is trying to run away from something into something else--better. During one of his helter skelter movements through the town he collides with a young woman in a hospital. As he collides, he clings to her, perhaps to steady himself. Hospital wardens try to peel off the boy from the woman, but, surprisingly the woman says to the boy, "You can hold me [...] but not so tight." Thus begins a saga of an interweaving of the boy's and the woman's lives.
The interweaving is complex and according to some reviews I've read, unsentimentally rendered. I am almost certain that the American film is loaded with juicy sentimentality. I think, I'd like to see the French film first.
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