С!ose **** (2022, Eden Dambrine, Gustav de Waele, Emilie Dequenne, Léa Drucker) – Classic Movie Review 12,367

The 2022 Belgian coming-of-age drama film Close is directed by Lukas Dhont, and written by Dhont and Angelo Tijssens, re-teaming after their first feature Girl (2018). It stars Eden Dambrine, Gustav de Waele, Emilie Dequenne and Léa Drucker, and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 26 May 2022 to critical acclaim and won the Grand Prix.

[Spoiler alert] The close friendship between 13-year-old boys Léo and Remi is dramatically fractured when Léo pushes Remi away after his passive-aggressive, casually and vaguely homophobic classmates tell them they interpret their super-friendly relationship as ‘a couple’. Their relationship is too close for comfort, at least for the silly, thoughtless classmates, and then for poor Léo, who starts getting sporty suddenly, joining the ice hockey team. It is not however too close for comfort for Remi, who is cut to pieces when Léo pushes him away.

Léo is in total meltdown turmoil, while the adults and classmates are useless in support, the parents and teachers equally hopeless in understanding or trying to handle the situation properly. In one bright spot, his older brother proves a slight exception to the rule, though. However, Léo struggles on and eventually gets up the courage to approach Rémi’s distraught mother Sophie (Émilie Dequenne), and, after several misfire attempts, to tell her what happened between the two of them.

Lukas Dhont ‘s heart-rending, honest and true 2022 drama film Close is a fiercely emotionally intense film about love and pain and the whole damn thing, as well about struggling with the implications of close friendship and the kind of adult responsibility that kids have to assume in a relationship. It’s also about ignorance, stupidity, misunderstanding and prejudice, that we see everywhere. It captures being the key age of 13 hauntingly. It’s kind of a crap time, though there are going to be others. In the long summer holidays, you can be yourself, be true to yourself, but when the school year begins, apparently you need to adapt to other people’s expectations and demands. Naturally, the film Close is not in favour of that, in fact it says that that is tragic. The subtlety here is that the boys’ school contemporaries aren’t bullies or monsters, just prone to being vaguely insulting or intrusive, but in the end that amounts to the same thing.

Léo is an incredibly bright, sensitive, knowing individual, and that, for now at least, is going to be his downfall as he disastrously attempts to distance himself from Rémi. It’s an appalling betrayal, especially from a nice kid like Léo. If he’d been just a bit more of an idiot like the rest of the kids, he might just have got on with it and everything might have been okay. For now, it’s not, it’s really not. But, in the end, it’s his intelligence that is going to see him though, to survival and hope for the future. He’s not short on grit and courage. But this time he can’t find them. Léo makes a terrible mistake in not being true to himself (and Remi) and both boys pay a terrible price for it.

The young Belgian actor Eden Dambrine is really rather brilliant as Leo, fortunately so as the whole film hinges on him, staring meaningfully and crying on cue at every heart-breaking moment, and there are quite a few. There are so many demands put on his skinny little shoulders that he doesn’t look like he could support the weight of the film single handed, but, hey, he does. To be fair, Émilie Dequenne has quite a bit to do, and so does Gustav de Waele, and they do it really well, but it is Dambrine’s show, and it is a tour-de-force.

The script and direction are perfectly considered and honed. There are moments of silence, pauses for thought, struggles to find words, long hard looks, just like in real life, but hardly ever in films. The film is packed with Pinteresque pauses, but nevertheless it moves swiftly along as the outcome is eagerly awaited. Where are we going with this? is the urgent continuing question as the film goes from idyllic summer to menacing autumn.

With its portrayal of long summer holidays spent by the boys in innocent intimacy, the film is not controversial in any way, but it is impossible to imagine this being made in the UK or US.

Close had its world premiere in competition for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival on 26 May 2022, where it was awarded the Grand Prix. It played in the Official Competition at the 2022 Sydney Film Festival, where it won the Sydney Film Prize.

On 23 July 2020 it was announced that Dhont had set up an open casting call for the two male lead roles, set to be played by amateur actors, with casting scheduled to take place at the end of August. The casting call was open to speakers of both French and Flemish, and Dhont decided to film it in French after casting. Principal photography began on 9 July 2021.

Dhont said: ‘Three years after the overwhelming trip of Girl, it’s incredibly good to be back on the set, with this hugely talented cast and crew, especially as this story is close to my heart.’

The film was released by Diaphana Distribution in France on 1 November 2022 and by Lumière in Benelux on 2 November. On 16 September 2022, the film was announced as Belgium’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards. It also won the award for Best Foreign Language Film from the National Board of Review.

The cast are Eden Dambrine as Léo, Gustav de Waele as Rémi, Émilie Dequenne as Sophie, Léa Drucker as Nathalie, Kevin Janssens as Peter, Marc Weiss as Yves, Igor van Dessel as Charlie, and Léon Bataille as Baptiste.

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 12,367

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