Close
Winner of last year’s Grand Prix at Cannes, Lukas Dhont’s second feature explores the intimate friendship of two thirteen-year-old boys.
Close won the Grand Prix at Cannes last year and, having admired the previous feature by Lukas Dhont, 2018’s Girl, I approached this new piece with the highest of expectations. Quality is indeed to be found here – it's present in all the lead performances and in the colour photography of Frank van den Eeden who makes much of the film’s setting, that of rural Belgium. Nevertheless, I was disappointed and for a variety of reasons.
The film’s title is a reference to the bond that exists between two 13-year-old boys who attend the same school: Léo (Eden Dambrine), an athletic boy who plays ice hockey, and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) who is musical and something of a prodigy on the oboe. The closeness between them could hardly be stronger and, with this being an age when even young children can be knowing about sexual matters, fellow pupils who talk about faggots ask if they are a couple. For all the intimacy of their relationship – even sharing a bed on stay overs for example - what we see shows that their friendship is innocent in the sense of lacking any sexual awareness, even if such attraction does exist unrecognised. Nevertheless, the comments made disturb Léo to the extent of making him instinctively turn away from Rémi. Indeed, as things turn out, it can be said that, like The Banshees of Inisherin, the very different Close is a film about the impact of the sudden breaking-off of an established friendship.
The approach taken by Dhont is to present this story in unhurried style which, also lacking any real sense of flow, renders Close almost minimalistic in character. That could have worked, of course, even though it extends to many of the subsidiary characters remaining undeveloped - they include the fathers of the two boys (Kevin Janssens and Marc Weiss), Léo’s brother Charlie (Igor van Dessel) and the other school pupils. In contrast to that, more time is given to Léo's mother (Léa Drucker) and especially to Rémi's mother (Émilie Dequenne) but everything revolves around the two boys and what happens to them. Admirable as the child actors in these roles are, I could not escape the feeling that the screenplay lacked the degree of conviction found in the dialogue of two other recent films dealing with youngsters, albeit of varying ages: one was the masterly Playground and the other Beautiful Beings. The latter was the work of Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson and like Playground it had no gay element in it, but the same director’s previous feature, 2016’s Heartstone, did and it handled it admirably.
However you choose to define them, the gay issues present in Close are managed far less satisfactorily. It could, of course, be interpreted as a story depicting the harm done by homophobic banter to an entirely platonic relationship that is misinterpreted. Equally it might be a portrait of two gay boys not yet old enough to be conscious of any underlying reason for their closeness. Then again it could be that, without it being realised, one of the boys is gay and the other not (the very situation depicted so persuasively in Heartstone). Any of these possibilities deftly developed could yield a good film, but Close opts to be elusive on this point. Even that could have seemed valid but various factors prevent it from being the case here. First, there’s the fact that Lukas Dhont is himself gay and in Girl chose as his central character a 15-year-old trans dancer. Like Close, Girl was written by Dhont and Angelo Tijssens and with that precedent inescapably in mind one is looking to find some gay element here. Indeed, that is further encouraged by the way in which the looks of the two boys are emphasised. In such films as Water Lilies (2007) and Tomboy (2011), Céline Sciamma has made studies of girls which, when touching on the possibility of lesbian instincts existing, find her judging with perfect precision the exact extent to which uncertainty and ambiguity are apt. But Close has a tendency to meander in later scenes that sometimes call for greater detail and clarification and that gives plenty of time for the viewer to ponder both on the motivation behind a key dramatic event and on the question of the boys’ sexuality without ever satisfying that curiosity. Ultimately far too much remains unanswered for the film to satisfy. Even the ending looks as though it wants to echo the last shot in Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups but then fails to deliver it. But perhaps I am being harsh on a work that is certainly well-intended and well acted and there are many voices eager to praise it.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Eden Dambrine, Gustav De Waele, Émilie Dequenne, Léa Drucker, Kevin Janssens, Marc Weiss, Igor van Dessel, Léon Bataille, Ahlaam Teghadouini, Hélène Theunissen, Peter Piron, Robin Keyaert.
Dir Lukas Dhont, Pro Michiel Dhont, Dirk Impens and Michel Saint-Jean, Screenplay Lukas Dhont and Angelo Tijssens Ph Frank van den Eeden, Pro Des Eve Martin, Ed Alain Dessauvage, Costumes Manu Verschueren, Sound Vincent Sinceretti.
Menuet Producties/Diaphana Films/Topkapi Films/Versus Production-Mubi.
105 mins. Belgium/Netherlands/France. 2022. UK Rel: 3 March 2023. US Rel: 2 December 2022. Cert. 12A.
