Lukas Dhont has made two award-winning films about the agony of adolescence: Girl, his 2018 portrait of a transgender ballet dancer; and now Close, which concerns the fragile friendship between two 13-year-old boys. So perhaps it is only natural that the baby-faced director buzzes with youthful energy. In the middle of asking a publicist for an oat latte with honey and hazelnut, he spies my mobile phone on the table of the film distributor’s office. “Oh my God, my coffee order’s being recorded!” he shrieks, like a class swot telling tales. “Ryan is using this in the Guardian!”
Dhont, who is 31 with a trimmed beard and a neat quiff, wears his heart on his sleeve. And what a sleeve: the dangling straitjacket-style arms of his white shirt render handshakes comically complicated. Worn over his beige trousers are shorts, also beige, which I mistake at first for a skirt. An abbreviated tie, reaching only as far as his sternum, runs from burnt crimson at one end to canary yellow at the other, as though it has been dunked in magma. “My mum taught fashion,” he explains. “Somehow I’ve always been close to the idea of storytelling through clothes.”
The narrative expressed by today’s outfit, then, is one of breezy confidence and self-acceptance. Close, which has picked up further awards and admirers since winning the Grand Jury prize at Cannes last year, is also in the running for the Oscar for best international feature. But its director hasn’t always had the swagger of a peacock. He grew up gay and sensitive in Dikkelvenne, near Ghent, and dreamt of becoming a dancer. At his school’s talent show at the age of 12, he performed an extravagant routine to Christina Aguilera’s Fighter. The bullying that followed was vicious and relentless.
Had he imagined the dance would win everybody over? “Yes, I think there was still this space where I thought it might impress. And there was so much creative energy inside me that needed to come out.” How does he feel now about that version of himself? “I love him,” he says, tilting his head. “He’s so brave. And it’s such a shame he didn’t think he was. In the years that came after, I saw that courage as a weakness and tried to repress it. When we want to belong, we betray parts of ourselves to feel validated.”
In Dhont’s case, that meant forgoing dance for ever. He picked up a video camera around the same time, casting family members as zombies and vampires, and using home movies as “something to flee into”. But he didn’t start to accept who he was until film school. “The big task of my adult life has been to deconstruct what I have created as armour and performance,” he says, “and work out which parts are really me.” One survival tactic at school was to try to be less like himself; less (as he saw it) deserving of his classmates’ opprobrium. Any male friends he had were pushed away as he came to fear intimacy: what it would cost him, the abuse it might attract.
It is this experience that informs Close. As the film begins, Léo and Rémi are rejoicing in a blissful, idyllic friendship. They goof around, ride their bikes, race through fields of flowers; they spin stories together during sleepovers in which they curl up in the same bed. They may be gay but there isn’t time to find out: as they start a new school, their relationship attracts the scrutiny and mockery of their peers. Self-consciousness begins to contaminate Léo’s demeanour. When Rémi tries to snuggle up as they lie together on the playing field, Léo squirms out from under him.
The picture is beautifully served by its lead actors, Gustav de Waele as Rémi and Eden Dambrine as Léo. The latter, with his ice-cream hair and floodlight eyes, is especially striking. Dhont first spotted him sitting with pals on a train. “Mainly, it was his eyes and his angelic quality. I was like, ‘Wow. This is a very intense young angel.’” He approached Dambrine and his friends to explain that he was making a film. Weren’t they creeped out? “Well, I have a …” He gestures to his boyish face, which surely grants him the benefit of the doubt wherever he goes. “I’m not that old.”
Fair enough. But predators can be young. “Oh my God!” he cries, sounding aghast. “That’s true. My first film was well-known in Belgium, though, so they could Google me.” Dambrine has said that when he called his mother about what was happening, she told him to get off the train immediately. “I think he was joking,” says Dhont. “You shouldn’t underestimate how much of a performer Eden is.” Indeed, the most gorgeous moment in the film shows Léo soothing Rémi by making up a bedtime story about a duck and a lizard. Dambrine improvised the scene himself, having rejected Dhont’s suggestion of a yarn set in outer space.
The boy is also, it transpires, a dancer. Did Dhont sense that in their initial encounter? “It’s like pheromones. When there is a dancer nearby in the universe, I see them.” I ask if his partner is a dancer and he laughs bashfully, breaking eye contact for the first time. “No, he’s not. I made a …” He does a swerving motion with his hand, suggesting a detour or digression. “I always try to stay close to the desire of dance. The dancer inside me never really left. I look at cinema through the eyes of a choreographer. I ask how I can translate what I want to say through bodies and composition.”
This he does most effectively with long-lens cinematography, preserving his young heroes’ privacy while also making us painfully aware of the world crowding in on them. A third of the way into Close, however, the subdued mood is disrupted by a catastrophic event that may make some viewers recoil. Why did that need to happen?
“Your question is beautiful,” he says, “because there’s a sense of hope. But we go there in the film because we want to address violence: the wars on the inside, not on the battlefield. I’m sorry if that’s brutal but for me it’s necessary to talk about that loss of tenderness in a way that shows the full impact. When we meet these boys, they are at the age when so many things can go wrong in that masculine universe. In puberty, there is this confrontation with a society that has norms and expectations around what it means to be a man – and it’s so much about not clinging, about being stoic.
“Society ruptures something essential in these young men as they grow up. We tell them not to listen to what they truly desire. For many people, that moment is the start of loneliness and of struggles with mental health. It’s when suicide rates go up.” Did he ever consider suicide when he was being bullied? “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know.” His voice is so soft and sad, I instantly regret asking.
Dhont is eloquent about the expectations placed on young men. What example did his own father set? “I feel he gave – and gives – what he can, but he is, of course, deeply influenced by the construction of gender that he was part of. I like to think everyone does their best.” Dhont’s parents separated when he was six. “My father told me he was away on adventures with Indiana Jones. I had never seen those films, so I thought this was a real man. It was only a few years later, in the video store, that I understood.” Isn’t it better to tell children the truth? “I’m thankful for what he did,” he says decisively. “My dad was injecting me with stories and cinema. I think he was protecting me.”
The traumatic dance contest, the bullying, the sense of growing up queer, the father off on fictitious swashbuckling escapades – small wonder Dhont keeps returning to childhood in his work, when his own was such a source of drama. “At the start of film school, I wanted to do films about sinking boats and zombies and Harrison Ford running through the jungle. I’d still love to do a queer Titanic! Well, Titanic is already super-queer, but an even queerer one.”
What changed his direction was seeing Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, directed by his compatriot Chantal Akerman. The 1975 feminist masterpiece, about three days in the life of a widowed housewife whose sex work is as mundane as the rest of her daily routines, was last year named greatest film of all time by Sight & Sound magazine. “It made me realise I could start filming what is around me rather than inventing things I couldn’t see.”
Will he always gravitate toward stories about children and adolescents? “My next film is about adults,” he says cheerfully. Then all at once, he is bouncing in his seat and jabbing his finger at me: “Ahahaha! I got you! I got you!” Wait, I tell him, I’m confused: is he joking when he says his next film will be about adults? “No,” he says, calming down. “It is, it is. I’m just happy I can say that, so you’re not like, ‘Oh, he’s so predictable.’” After an hour in Dhont’s company, that’s the last word that springs to mind.
• Close is in cinemas from 3 March
