Close (2022)
Rémi (Gustav De Waele) and Léo (Eden Dambrine) share a tight friendship in Close
I’ve long wanted movies to delve more deeply into a still fraught subject: tenderness between men. Non-sexual.
We need movies that show men relying on each other without a sexual connection, where men can say to each other, I’m here and I won’t back away when I see you’re in trouble.
But such attempts often fall into a borderland, where closeness and sexual connection are simply assumed. Maintaining a trusting friendship with another man can open you up to the suggestion – or accusation – that you’re both gay.
Close beautifully renders the way this presumption can arise even when the uncomprehending principals are barely into their teens. It’s rightly been honored for opening up the question with taste and grace.
Winner of the 2022 Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, the movie is also one of five nominees for Best International Feature at the upcoming Oscars. Close belongs on your must-watch list.
Directed by the Belgian Lukas Dhont, who wrote the screenplay with Angelo Tijssens, the story, set in modern day rural Belgium, begins in bright, pastoral summertime (Frank van den Eeeden did the lush cinematography).
Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) are best friends, aged 13. Their ages matter because they’re on that cusp between pre-pubescence and adolescence, when the heart and the body want what they want.
Boys unbound, they gleefully run and bicycle beside one another at breakneck speed. In quiet moments they share hopes and fancies. Léo spins out tales of escape into fantasy realms. Rémi keeps his feet on the ground and sticks to practicing his oboe, an instrument he’s beginning to master.
We pick up slight intimations of sexuality between the two. They don’t give such notions a thought. They’re intimate but seem to have little wish for privacy.
Léo works with his parents and older brother in a business harvesting blossoms within Belgium’s world-famous floral industry. Rémi lives contentedly with his parents, who spoil both boys and often let Léo sleep over.
Rémi, an only child, says Léo is the brother he never had. Rémi’s mother Sophie (Émilie Dequenne) calls Léo a “son of her heart” and can lie grinning in the grass alongside both boys, fusing their connection, making them all the more inseparable.
Léo, Sophie (Émilie Dequenne) and Rémi bask in a summer of wonder in Close
What binds these two? As they wrestle with one another, wield sticks pretending they’re fending off armies, rest in bed with bony limbs entangled, we realize that they’re more than friends. They’ve paired off. It’s them against the world.
Until, suddenly, it’s them against one another. A snake has slithered into their garden.
Close accomplishes a rare feat: fully immersed in their tactile subject, ardent yet disciplined, the moviemakers refuse to succumb to sentimentality.
In summer, the boys are free spirits. With fall’s arrival they enter middle school, where fellow students can’t help noticing how physically close they are. They’re teased as “a couple”. Indeed, they rarely take their eyes off one another, even when they know everyone’s watching.
Their schoolmates’ relentless stares wriggle in between them. Léo squirms at the invasion. In what seems the mildest way, he pulls away from Rémi physically, to quash suspicions of sexuality between them.
It matters enormously that we never see either youth engage in any sexual act, which makes the story’s sudden twists all the more wrenching.
Among a number of fine youth performances in 2022, Dambrine’s is unquestionably the best I’ve seen. He’s like a find in nature. I can’t think of another actor young or old who’s mesmeric in exactly his — for me still indefinable — way.
Noticing the slight shift in their closeness, Rémi is hurt and perplexed. Inexplicably, the two engage in a knockdown drag-out fight on the playground, with students and faculty looking on, until they’re separated by teachers.
Both are stunned to see their confusion turn to rage. Neither knows how to say he’s sorry.
The separation looks irreversible. Léo shuns Rémi and steels himself by passionately taking up the bruising sport of ice hockey. A contact sport to avoid contact. The bewildered Rémi is consumed by sadness.
Dhont’s stately direction pulls us in – paradoxically, because he keeps the camera’s gaze, even peering directly in the boys’ faces, at a slight remove. The camera itself seems to linger on and consider the feelings it’s revealing.
The action is meticulously staged, and every shoulder shrug or suspicious lift of an eye that seems impromptu also feels held by the director for us, so we can get a crucial closer look.
The two young actors at the core portray innocence and its loss with startling ease. De Waele as Rémi conveys a smiling trust that turns out to be too deep, too unconditional. He’s not prepared for a friend’s rejection, and we see him crushed.
But surprisingly, we don’t hold the separation against Léo. It certainly feels like betrayal, but Léo is clearly as mired and baffled as Rémi.
Dambrine is breathtaking as Léo. With his uncanny immersion in a boy’s roiling emotions, Dambrine makes it seem as if the whole world is falling on Léo’s shoulders. Which, in a vital sense, is actually what’s happened.
When you’re 13, family, friends and school are the world. To live freely in it costs. That’s the hard lesson learned.
Among a number of fine youth performances in 2022, Dambrine’s is unquestionably the best I’ve seen. He’s like a find in nature. I can’t think of another actor young or old who’s mesmeric in exactly his — for me still indefinable — way.
A crucial confrontation near the end between Sophie and Léo feels hastily conceived and doesn’t fit with the tensile strength we’ve seen in both these characters before. In my head I screamed Rewrite! as I watched, because the episode short-changes the empathy both mother and boy have shown before.
Yet this doesn’t detract from the movie’s breathtaking closing shot. It’s so simple, yet it completes the story. A young person faces forward into life.
Without doubt, though, change has happened. The past has become like one of the fields that lie waiting for Léo’s family to cultivate: fallow up top, but below abundant and self-renewing in ways too deep to know for sure.