Lucas Dhont’s second feature, Close, is like watching a memory establish in real time. Two friends, Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele), live loudly behind the shield of a carefree childhood summer. In an uninterrupted introduction, we see a world imagined by two boys — sacred and intimate, where the rules and jokes are understood by the only two people that need to know. But this sort of friendship will always be threatened by the hard truths of the other world that pushes on its own accords. When Léo and Rémi start school, many of their peers have opinions about their closeness. A girl asks if they’re together. In these observations, Léo hears accusations and starts to distance himself from Rémi. They fight but they don’t have the words to explain why.
Close is the kind of film that seems familiar and predicable. Similar to his first film Girl (which follows Lara, a young trans ballerina dancer with gender dysphoria), Dhont is drawn to the internal conflicts of being a kid. Even under the protection of unconditional love (in Girl, it was Arieh Worthaler as Lara’s father; in Close, it’s Rémi’s mother Sophie played by Émilie Dequenne), there will always be schoolroom cruelty, crippling self-doubt, and growing pains. Though this script is drawn from Dhont’s experiences, identity of queerness is a secondary thought in the friendship and the breakdown thereafter. Instead, Dhont questions what can be accepted as closeness between two male peers when it is not through a romantic lens. He challenges that notion and devastates it through the development of an incident — and I’m sure everyone has a few events that have cemented who they are — that shapes the rest of the boys’ lives. If Aftersun was piecing the puzzles of a muted mystery through MiniDV recorder videos, Close is sobbing in the present while the surrounding life forms the challenging, yet halcyon, days of boyhood.
As if to replace the words that the boys couldn’t find, visual clues trail behind their journeys. Léo works at a flower farm with his family, and the sharp colors in the sunlight fade into wilting grays under a storm as he undergoes saddened stages that adults go through. When the boys begin to separate, the space between them expands, veers off, and personifies into two drifting, albeit strong, forces. Dhont uses adults as an emotional checkpoint to show that aging doesn’t make one immune; Sophie, who provides parental refuge and acceptance, can also feel lost in their orbits. Even if everyone is written with good intentions, the brutalities of being a parent and being a kid will be here even if it seems like our generations feel better than the last.
Though Close‘s cinematography and character arcs speak in clarity (to a fault — the story itself doesn’t offer any more enthralling tales than the next coming-of-age and sometimes feel like a step-by-step manual), there are questions left unanswered. The nature of life-altering incidents (and the decisions that were made before and after) is that no one is promised a neatly-packaged resolution. But Dhont gives an intelligent authority to his young characters to let them find themselves. We’d only be so lucky if it were an easy thing.
Close
2022
dir. Lukas Dhont
105 min.
Opens Friday, 2/10 @ Kendall Square Cinema and AMC Boston Common
