A tale of childhood bonds broken lands a weighty emotional punch in writer-director Lukas Dhont’s Oscar-nominated second film, a heartbreaking coming-of-age picture that represents Belgium in the best international feature category feature category, and which shared the Grand Prix at Cannes last year. Astonishingly natural and engaging performances from young newcomers Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele lend heartfelt authenticity to a film that builds upon the promise of 2018’s Girl, confirming Dhont as a deft and empathetic chronicler of the tumultuous anguish and ecstasy of adolescence.
We meet Léo and Rémi on the cusp of their teenage years, approaching secondary school. Best friends, they are like two sides of a divided soul, locked together in a bubble of play-acting that can transform the world around them into a field of dreams. Everything about them is perfectly in sync; physically, mentally, emotionally. An early shot of the two boys running side by side through a field of soon to be harvested flowers positively bursts with joy, reminiscent of the glowing cornfields into which our young hero escapes in Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher.
Nothing can come between this pair until fellow pupils start to notice and comment upon their closeness. “Are you together?” asks a girl, and when Léo replies “No!”, the follow-up question is: “Are you sure?” While Rémi remains silent, Léo reacts with horror, withdrawing from his constant companion, turning his attentions instead to the more rough-and-tumble world of ice hockey, in which boys will be boys and faces are covered by protective masks. As for Rémi, his inability to understand Léo’s rejection (perhaps intertwined with a deeper understanding of what’s going on) erupts in rage, isolation and then something altogether more tragic.
With Girl, which won the Caméra d’Or and the Queer Palm at Cannes in 2018, Dhont was accused in some quarters of exploiting the story of a young transgender ballet dancer, with Oliver Whitney in the Hollywood Reporter calling it “sadistic… made for uneducated cisgender audiences to feel like they get it”. It’s possible that the self-harming aspects of Close may similarly provoke accusations of melodramatic contrivance or tearjerking manipulation. Yet the register of the film remains so resolutely low-key that even its most overtly dramatic scenes are tempered by a sense of distance and understatement. To their great credit, screenwriters Dhont and Angelo Tijssens never allow their characters to tell us directly what we have already divined. Instead, the director trusts his actors and his editor, Alain Dessauvage, to do the narrative heavy lifting, allowing cinematographer Frank van den Eeden’s unobtrusively intimate camerawork to focus on the faces of the protagonists, and on the subtle movements and gestures of their bodies.
It helps that the adult players are every bit as convincing as their young counterparts, particularly Émilie Dequenne, who first rose to fame playing the teenage title role in the Dardenne brothers’ 1999 Palme d’Or winner Rosetta, for which she earned a Cannes best actress prize. Now, a couple of decades later, she plays Rémi’s mother, Sophie, in whose nurturing company Léo seems to lose himself. A scene in which the boys and Sophie recline together in an outdoor idyll while she jokes about their relative affections for her is blissfully unguarded, casting the trio as part of one happy family. Later, when Rémi’s father quietly breaks down in tears at dinner, it’s Léo’s sense of loss and guilt that strike the clearest note.
A superb score by Valentin Hadjadj perfectly captures the knife-edge emotional tone of the picture, with spiralling motifs and lonely soaring strings evoking both the fluttering hearts and searing confusions of its central characters. It’s a gorgeous accompaniment, full of longing and loss in a manner that reminded me somewhat of Nicholas Britell’s work on Barry Jenkins’s Oscar winner Moonlight. Both films are concerned with the youthful search for identity – the overwhelming sadness of turning one’s back on the infinite possibilities of the past, the guilty burdens of the present and the elusive hope of redemption in the future. No wonder their respective scores chime together so harmoniously.
