"Close" badly wants your tears and, on occasion, it earns them. A flawlessly acted, precision-tooled heartbreaker from 31-year-old Belgian writer-director Lukas Dhont, it tells an Edenic love story, conjuring a rapturous state of intimacy that gives way to a tragic fall from grace. What gives the movie its faint whisper of the taboo — a taboo that it proceeds to dismantle — is that the love story here happens to be between two 13-year-old boys, Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele). They're longtime best friends who have grown as close as brothers, with none of the usual hang-ups about physical affection between boys. Here, even a head resting on a friend's shoulder expresses a casual but powerful sense of mutual belonging.
Léo and Rémi are inseparable, in part because they've both been raised in gorgeous pastoral isolation. Léo's parents are flower farmers, cueing many lovely shots of the boys running and riding their bicycles past dandelion fields. (For better or worse, Dhont and his cinematographer, Frank van den Eeden, seem incapable of composing an unlovely shot.) The camera speeds alongside the boys, keeping pace with them and, it seems, sharing in their joyous sense of abandon. But then it will come to a gentle standstill, tenderly observing as Rémi's mother, Sophie (Émilie Dequenne), laughs and tumbles with the boys in the grass, or as the two boys share a bed in Rémi's room, its suggestively dark red walls enfolding them like a cocoon.
Is there an element of physical attraction at play here? Dhont doesn't say, and his silence raises another question: Why does it matter? The best thing about "Close," an Oscar nominee for international feature and a major prizewinner at last year's Cannes Film Festival, is its firm but gentle destigmatization of boyhood intimacy. Whether Léo and Rémi are going through an unusually intense phase of their friendship or experiencing the early adolescent stirrings of sexual desire — two equally plausible and hardly mutually exclusive possibilities — their bond deserves time, space and understanding, not judgment.
