Kika

Bluesky

Spaces of enclosure recurrently stand as a symbol of walking through rooms of personal change in Alexe Poukine’s debut fiction feature.

Social worker Kika’s (Manon Clavel) career orbits around housing, finding homes in Brussels for those in need. In her personal life, she is a mother with an only daughter and a seemingly loving husband (Thomas Coumans). Yet, her universe turns upside down when she encounters a new lover (Makita Samba) while they are trapped together in a bicycle repair shop.

In a whirlwind, her life unfolds in an unfortunate series of events that lead the mother to resort to prostitution, at least at first, to make ends meet. This spatial symbolism is emphasised visually by cinematographer Colin Lévèque. The strikingly chromatic shift of the rooms in the love hotel Kika visits moves from a true love dark red from the time she frequented the place with her lover, to a distant blue in the beginning of her sex worker career and finally, to a carnal red equivalent of her embracing her new job.

As much as a building has a structure, a film must have one as well. Nevertheless, Kika exhausts a considerable quantity of its plot in first half hour. The fast pace of events, unusual for Belgian cinema, clashes with a common naturalistic approach to the acting. So much is happening at once in Kika’s life that the viewer has a hard time grasping the supposedly long lasting emotional challenges she is facing. It feels as if a 17-year-old marriage has never happened, a divorce is overlooked almost as much and a death is not treated by enough runtime. Kika plays creatively with spaces and places, yet it leaves too little room for credible emotional processing.

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