Genre Comedy

Je suis un vélo (2018)

Item: Je suis un vélo
Rating: 1.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★ — Je suis un vélo (2018)

Right. Two minutes and seven seconds. No dialogue. A child's bike gets nicked, the thief gives it a quick lick of paint, then hands it off to a different kid, who rides away with the original kid perched on the handlebars. Roll credits. That's it. That is the entire film. And I'm sitting here, pencil hovering over the scorecard, genuinely unsure what I'm supposed to do with that.

I'll be upfront: this one came courtesy of my A-Z World Movie Tour, the challenge I've set myself to watch a film from every country in the world. French Guiana's entry landed on my screen and I was ready. Open mind, fresh eyes, the whole lot. What I was not ready for was a runtime that barely clears the two-minute mark and asks to be taken seriously as a film. I've sat through longer adverts for car insurance.

Look, I'm not one of those people who reflexively sneers at short films. Short films can be brilliant. They can be more affecting in five minutes than a bloated prestige drama manages in two and a half hours. I've watched short films on this tour that surprised me, moved me, or at least left me with something to chew on afterwards. Cigarette is a good example of a short that earns its brevity. This, though? I kept waiting for it to do something with its own premise.

The setup has the bones of a fable, I'll give it that. There's something almost parable-like about the cycle of theft and accidental generosity, the way the stolen bike ends up bringing two kids together by the end. If you squint at it in a certain light, you could probably write a undergraduate essay about community and restitution and the redistribution of small joys in postcolonial French Guiana. Go on then, someone write that essay. I'll wait.

But here's the thing about fables: they need a moment, however brief, that lands. A look, a beat, something that makes the meaning click into place. "Je suis un vélo" just sort of... stops. The kids ride off. I sat there blinking at the runtime counter. Was that it? Yes. Yes, that was it.

At two minutes with no speech and a story you could summarise in a single sentence, there's simply no room for the film to build any kind of feeling. It doesn't have time to make me care about the first child, so when the bike gets stolen I feel nothing. It doesn't establish anything about the man who takes it, so his repainting and re-gifting reads as arbitrary rather than meaningful. And the final image of both kids together on the bike, which is presumably meant to land as something quietly transcendent, just washes over me completely. Transcendent. Yeah.

I genuinely don't know who this is for or what it's trying to achieve beyond ticking the box of "film from French Guiana." Maybe that's uncharitable. Maybe I'm the problem. Maybe somewhere out there is a viewer who found those two minutes quietly devastating and I'm just too thick to see it. I doubt it, but I'm willing to entertain the possibility.

What I'm less willing to entertain is the idea that this constitutes a satisfying film experience by any reasonable measure. One star, and I'll be honest, that star is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a very short journey.

Rating: ★ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2025-06-19

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