The Bicycle

In my opinion, Father and Daughter was a beautiful short film about the loss of a loved one and our desire to reunite with them. The day before I saw this short film, a friend of mine lost his father. The death of his father took me back to the memories of some of my loved ones who passed away a few years ago. After Thursday's class I started thinking about that in context of the short film and I noticed something very interesting. 

For me, the thing that stood out in the film was the bicycle. I don't think that director Michaël Dudok de Wit randomly selected the bicycle to be in the film. I think the bicycle depicts the lives of the father and the daughter. In the film, the bicycles are depicted as the human body, and the humans are depicted as souls.

At the start of the film, the father leaves his bicycle beside a tree, hugs his daughter, and sits in a boat that is at the coast and rows away from the coast. I think that the area where the father leaves his bicycle is his grave, and leaving his bicycle there signifies his death. 

Then we see the daughter's life. She grows up and with her age, the size of her bicycle get bigger. She starts riding with other girls and in due time, falls in love, gets married and has children of her own. However, she always keeps visiting the same place where her father left her and wonders when she would see him again. But gradually, as she gets old, she finds it hard to ride the bicycle and has to slow down and eventually stop riding the bike. Her walking and pulling the bicycle along shows that she could not keep up with her health due to her age and had to slow down. Towards the end she takes her bicycle to the same place where her father left her, where she would always go to see if her father was ever coming back. She parks her bicycle, which falls twice and again a third time, even after she uses the bicycle stand, and then wanders off into the tall grass. I think that falling of the bicycle depicts her death and her soul moving on to another place. There are no bicycles seen after that, which shows that she is now in eternity. She then finds her father's boat in the middle of the tall grass, and curls up in it and probably falls to sleep. When she wakes up, she sees her father. As she runs to him, we see her get younger and younger and when they hug, she can be seen as a young woman.

The director has not shown them die and go to their grave. Instead, he shows them going into a place that everyone goes to at a particular time. He shows death as not something that should be feared, but something we should look forward to. I think that's what makes this short film so beautiful. The director has shown the beauty of a tragedy.