REVIEW: New Film Close, By Lukas Dhont, Explores The Fine Line Of Coming Of Age
Close, directed by Lukas Dhont, wins Grand Prix prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and becomes Belgium’s Shortlisted Oscar Entry for Best International Feature.
Lukas Dhont’s Close follows two 13-year-old boys, Leo and Rami who are about to begin secondary school and experience challenges they never saw coming in their naive adolescence. Close explores the nature of a friendship that is so close it’s like a brotherhood or family and the fine lines that may or may be crossed in what society deems as a traditional friendship amongst boys.
Their masculinity is tested and jeered at as students learn that they enjoy each other’s company less like friends and teetering on the playful, carefree, and loving relationship that is foreign to most boys this age. With this outside scrutiny comes embarrassment and shame as some of the old habits and closeness the boys had experienced in the past are hyper-scrutinized and under an extreme microscope.
Dhont visited his old school in Belgium and upon seeing an old teacher he began to weep. Unsure of whether it was guilt or pride, Lukas reflected on the schoolyard and all of the struggles he faced as a young queer boy learning to find his way.
“It’s about the deep, emotional, and fragile connection between two human beings, two boys, that gets disrupted by the notions of society, by the notion of masculinity, and by the notion that, when you’re a young boy, intimacy is seen as something that has to be linked to sexuality or femininity,” Dhont says.
Dhont is a beautiful storyteller who layers beautiful visuals with the struggles of intimacy, connection, loss, grief, and regret. The film leans heavily on the unspoken with the boys existing in a quiet playful natural manner only to be upended by the boisterous chaos of the schoolyard and ice hockey rink. These louder scenes almost are indicative of the destruction caused by the inference of the boy’s peers.
Gustav de Waele and Émilie Dequenne first-time actors are extraordinary. Gustav’s role as Remi is one who doesn’t understand Leo’s pull to move away from the friendship. Leo is feeling the pressure and takes up ice hockey to somehow show his masculinity to ward off any suspicions about a relationship he may not fully understand. Things escalate to violence as Remi can’t comprehend why he has to suppress and lose a relationship in which he finds love and joy in. In a dramatic twist, tragedy strikes and we are engrossed with heavy waves of loss as the grief spreads across the boys’ two families.
The film stars Eden Dambrine, Igor Van Dessel, Émilie Dequenne, and Léa Drucker and is written by Lukas Dhont and Angelo Tijssens and can be streamed here.
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