Old Yorker

  • Close

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lukas Dhont (2022)

    In Close the young Belgian director Lukas Dhont brings off a succession of high-impact scenes at the expense of underlying narrative coherence.  But some of the scenes are individually terrific and Dhont contrives to tell a before-and-after story that’s tragic and moving, as well as beautifully acted.

    In rural Belgium, two thirteen-year-old boys, Léo and Rémi, are best friends.   They play, joke, run and ride their bikes together. Léo gets on fine with his parents and elder brother but sleeps over at Rémi’s what seems nearly every night.  Rémi is an only child, also with loving parents, who treat Léo as one of the family.  There’s an easy intimacy, conversational and physical, between the boys, who often share a bed.  On their first day at high school, this closeness doesn’t go unremarked by kids in their class:  two of the girls ask if Léo and Rémi are ‘a couple’.  It’s blonde-haired Léo, the more socially confident and conspicuous of the two, who angrily denies – on behalf of himself and quiet, dark-haired Rémi – the girls’ insinuations.  It’s Léo who, in the days that follow, is the particular target of homophobic insults from others, boys as well as girls, in the playground.  And it’s Léo who decides to deal with the problem by putting distance between himself and his friend.  He takes up the invitation of another boy at school to join an ice hockey team.  There are still sleepovers but Léo tells his host to stay in his own bed and is angry to find Rémi beside him when he wakes up next morning.  One day, for the first time, Léo doesn’t wait for Rémi, who’s left to cycle to school alone.  Hurt and upset, Rémi fights with Léo in the playground and teachers have to intervene.  Rémi is also conspicuous by his unexpected absence from a class trip to the coast.  Léo returns from this to learn from his mother that ‘Something happened’.  Rémi has committed suicide.

    From the first scenes you get a strong impression of Dhont’s priorities and how he’s going to work.  Close begins with Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustave de Waele) playacting:  they’re inside a building that is threatened by invasion from hordes of enemies outside.  The scenario immediately strikes you as symbolic and predictive – and the let’s-pretend as implausibly childish for thirteen-year-olds.  Léo and Rémi leave their hideout to sprint through the flower farm run by Léo’s parents (Léa Drucker and Marc Weiss) and the surrounding countryside:  Dhont and his cinematographer, Frank van Eeden, emphasise the boys’ laughing innocence, in a matching paradisal landscape.  Their bike-riding/racing places similar stress on the freedom and exhilaration of childhood happiness – the stress announces that this will be brutally aborted.

    Message received, loud and clear, yet there are also more surprising, affecting bits in the ‘before’ part of Close.  It’s not only Léo’s and Rémi’s inseparability that’s intriguing:  a scene where both boys nestle close to Rémi’s mother, Sophie (Émilie Dequenne), perfectly relaxed about this as she lies in the sun, is remarkable.  Rémi is a promising oboist.  On the eve of a concert in which he’ll play a solo, Léo jokes about cheerleading from the front row; he doesn’t quite say he’ll enjoy distracting his friend but that’s the implication.  Rémi is anxious but performs without his nerves getting the better of him.  In the front row, alongside Rémi’s proud parents, Léo watches keenly.  After a while, his eyes fill with tears.  A detractor can easily dismiss this moment as another of Dhont’s predictors (Léo has read the script) but it doesn’t give that impression as you watch it.  You register, rather, that Léo is surprised by the effect of Rémi’s playing and his own response to it.

    Lukas Dhont has made clear in interviews that he drew on his own schooldays and experience – on the receiving end – of adolescent homophobia.  He has said too that both main characters in Close are based partly on himself.  Dhont hasn’t suggested, however, that he actually experienced a trauma as wrenching or the legacy of a guilty conscience as persisting as his protagonist’s.  The absolute rupture between Léo and Rémi that Dhont has invented proves to be too big for him to handle – in relation to Rémi’s parents’ loss of their adored only child, the furnace guilt of Léo’s horror at what may be – what he sees as – the consequences of his actions, and his own sense of loss.  Léo seems too bright and self-aware not to realise what has happened; you get the increasing feeling it’s the film-maker who won’t face up to it – who tends to evade by recourse to melodramatic storytelling.

    The school outing to the seaside is cut short without explanation from the teachers; the kids, when their coach arrives back at school, are puzzled that their parents have been summoned to collect them.  These details succeed in creating foreboding but are unrealistic:  instructing parents to meet their children might make sense if there’d been an accident on the trip itself but why would the school raise widespread alarm on receipt of news that a child not on the trip had died?  The melodrama is made more salient when, after a teacher has told the kids to get off the coach but Léo refuses to do so, the teacher then exits the scene – so as not to get in the way of Léo’s confrontation inside the coach with his understandably distressed mother, and her shocking news.  (And it is shocking:  I’d seen the film’s trailer several times but hadn’t guessed that a child’s suicide was the pivotal event in Close.)

    In the aftermath of Rémi’s death, the school arranges a form of bereavement therapy for the kids in his class:  each boy and girl is asked to write down and read out – to the whole class – their memories of Rémi.  We don’t hear what Léo writes down:  instead, we see his angry reaction to another boy’s recollection that Rémi was always happy.  When Léo takes issue with this, the teacher reminds him that everyone in the class has the right to express themselves; Léo storms out of the room.  There’s no further mention of this eruption.  The boy who offends him also recalls that Léo and Rémi were great ‘buddies’:  you wonder why a school enlightened enough to run this kind of group therapy hasn’t at least discussed with Léo’s parents the possibility that their son may have a need for more extensive grief counselling.  The incident with the other boy and the lack of follow-up to Léo’s fury serve to confirm that Dhont is ignoring the issue – Léo must keep his feelings under wraps until the director is good and ready.   We could believe that Léo, if offered counselling, would resist it – preferring to throw himself (as he does) into lending a hand on the family farm and the macho hurly-burly of ice hockey, often uncertain on the ice but relatively safe inside his anonymising crash helmet.  We can’t believe that counselling is never mentioned by the school or that Léo’s practical but sensitive parents are apparently as tight-lipped as their younger son about Rémi.

    Dhont leaves vague the extent of the two sets of parents’ contact with each other – until, that is, Léo’s parents, Nathalie and Yves, invite Rémi’s mother and father for dinner one evening.  The scene that follows encapsulates what’s wrong and right with Close.  What’s wrong is that the episode is conceived as a one-off highlight, insufficiently connected to what has happened and what will happen.  What’s right is that Dhont’s dialogue (he wrote the screenplay with Angelo Tijssens) and the acting are excellent.  Léo and his older brother, Charlie (Igor Van Dessel), join the four adults at the dinner table; this creates a semblance of normality and, at the same time, draws attention to Rémi’s absence.  That pattern is repeated in the tentative conversation round the table and where this leads.  Sophie and her husband, Peter (Kevin Janssens), politely try to minimise how much they’re required to say.  After confirming, in answer to Nathalie’s question, that they’ve both now returned to work, Sophie and Peter ask Charlie about his future plans.  What may have seemed to them a safe subject to move onto is, of course, anything but.  When Charlie talks about a gap year, travelling with his girlfriend, it’s a reminder that the now childless couple doesn’t have that to look forward to.  Peter starts to cry, acutely embarrassed to do so.

    The film’s climactic scene is also emotionally powerful for what it shows of a bereaved parent’s pain and sense of obligation to obscure and deflect this.  At last it’s time for Léo to admit his guilt and he goes to Sophie’s workplace:  she’s a nurse on a hospital maternity ward – an excessive application of salt in the wound!  Léo is evidently upset and Sophie leaves work to drive him home.  On the way, they stop beside woodland.  When Léo blurts out that it’s his fault that Rémi died, Sophie orders him out of the car and he runs off into the wood.  She instantly regrets what she’s done and follows him.  She finds Léo brandishing a tree branch.  Sophie keeps determinedly calm, moving slowly towards Léo and disarming him through a tight embrace.  It doesn’t make sense that Léo’s confession is, for Sophie, such a bolt from the blue:  in other words, Dhont crudely engineers the supposedly cathartic hug.  The scene is saved by his keeping the camera on Émilie Dequenne’s stricken face when she holds and comforts Léo – as she can’t hold and comfort her own son.

    This is Dhont’s second feature.  His first, Girl (2018), which I haven’t seen, is about a transgender girl who wants to be a ballerina and Close has unsurprisingly been co-opted, with Dhont’s public encouragement,  as an LGBTQ etc film although that label limits its meanings (and it’s a virtue of Close that it’s never explicit about either boy’s sexuality, whatever the playground rumours).  The film seems also to be about the challenge of preserving the bond of a special youthful friendship in a new, bigger world than the one in which the friendship took root and flourished:  it reminded me of Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2000) albeit the two girls in that started off at the end of their high-school years.  The oboe solo and the unhappy dinner party are Dhont’s best extended sequences but there are some fine briefer bits – like the morning-after bedroom fight between Léo and Rémi, in which the latter seems to hope his friend is just pretending to be angry, until it’s clear he’s not.  There’s a nice echo of their opening trapped-in-a-house-surrounded-by-the-enemy in a scene where Baptiste (Léon Bataille), the kid who gets Léo into ice hockey, comes round to his house and they play video games.  Dhont repeats, with variations, certain images and events in the story as if to prove how well everything fits together.  For example, the opening bike ride, with Léo and Rémi shown side by side, precedes a ride where one boy follows the other; this leads on to shots of each of the boys biking alone.  This kind of neat arrangement is cosmetic, though – ditto the overuse of Valentin Hadjadj’s melancholy music.  Dhont hasn’t thought things through – quite possibly because he didn’t want to.

    The acting – and Dhont’s orchestration of it – is another matter.  Where do young Belgian film-makers get their talent for directing children?  This time last year Laura Wandel got an amazing performance from seven-year-old Maya Vanderbeque, as the main character in Playground (2021).  Dhont, Wandel’s junior by nearly a decade, does likewise with Eden Dambrine and Gustave De Waele.  These boys are several years older than Maya Vanderbeque but it’s fair to say that more is expected of them – Dambrine anyway – in terms of holding a longer film together.  Dambrine’s Léo really does seem to age following Rémi’s death (and although it stretches credibility to have teenagers playing the game we see at the start, I was glad that Dhont opted for this rather than using younger boys in flashback to earlier in their childhoods).  Gustave De Waele creates his effects very subtly; his Rémi is painfully sensitive.  Eden Dambrine is an unusual adolescent screen performer in that he’s thoroughly assured yet his acting feels pure.  The same was true, over twenty years ago, of Émilie Dequenne in the title role in the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta (1999).  It’s a pleasure to watch Dequenne in Close, now in her early forties but as luminously natural as ever.

    The action is apparently set in the present but only superficially so:  Lukas Dhont also wants to evoke the world of nearly twenty years ago, when he was in his vulnerable early teens.  Football talk in the playground is about Ronaldinho and Ronaldo, as well as Kylian Mbappé.  The kids use the internet but there’s a noticeable lack of mobile phones.  I wondered if urban adolescents of today wouldn’t at least mention, perhaps call out, bullying, as well as profess more liberal attitudes towards different sexual orientations.  Nothing gets said along these lines, however.  The film begins during school summer holidays and ends twelve months later, when Léo makes his way through the fields to Rémi’s parents’ home.  It’s empty:  we assume they’ve moved away to try and make a new start in a less poignant place.  As Léo slowly retraces his steps, he pauses, turns and looks into the camera for what feels like a full minute but probably isn’t.  This, the final shot of Close, struck me when I saw the film as Lukas Dhont’s retrospective gaze as much as his protagonist’s.  I also felt that Léo’s face appeared to be telling Rémi ‘I’ll never forget you’ without admitting enduring self-reproach.  Watching (part of) this shot again on the film’s trailer, I think I did Eden Dambrine an injustice:  his expression is more ambiguous than I’d thought.  There’s plenty to take issue with in Close but there’s no arguing with Dhont’s direction of the actors, especially the younger ones.

    7 March 2023

  • The Rules of the Game

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La règle du jeu

    Jean Renoir (1939)

    The Rules of the Game premiered in Paris, in July 1939, to a vociferously hostile audience.  Few press reviews were wholly favourable and the film fared poorly at the box office in the weeks following its opening – the dual setback an unpleasant surprise to Jean Renoir, whose 1930s pictures usually flourished commercially and critically.   At a time when war in Europe was increasingly seen as inevitable, Renoir’s skewering of the French upper classes and the social hierarchy that they headed, by way of satirical comedy, was widely considered ‘frivolous’ as well as ‘unpatriotic’.  Renoir kept cutting bits from the film – from its original 113 minutes down to 85 – but to no commercial avail.  In October 1939, The Rules of the Game was banned in France on the grounds that it was ‘depressing, morbid, immoral [and had] … an undesirable influence over the young’.  In 1942, the original negative was thought to have perished in an Allied bombing raid that destroyed the G M Film Lab in Boulogne-sur-Seine.  Soon after the end of World War II, which Renoir had spent on the other side of the Atlantic, a print of his most abbreviated version of the film was found and a new print made from that.  It was ten years later, in 1956, when a French film restoration company, which had acquired the rights to The Rules of the Game, tracked down boxes found on the site of the G M Film Lab.  These contained negative prints of the film, as well as duplicated prints and sound mixes.  A process of restoration, in which Renoir, now back in France, was involved, began:  the restored version, missing only one scene from the version that opened in Paris in 1939, was shown at the Venice Film Festival of 1959.  Critical reappraisal of the film, in its 85-minute form, had been gathering momentum for some years before then.  The release of the near-complete original sealed its reputation, which The Rules of the Game has never since lost, as a classic.

    The early scenes are set in and on the outskirts of Paris:  at Le Bourget, where aviator André Jurieux (Roland Toutain) receives a hero’s welcome home after a trip across the Atlantic and back in his plane; and in Paris apartments, including that of André’s lover, Christine de la Cheyniest (Nora Gregor).  Her absence from the crowds at Le Bourget so distresses André that he tells a radio reporter (Lise Elina) as much, and censures Christine – in a live broadcast that she hears in her apartment while she dresses for the evening, attended by her maid, Lisette (Paulette Dubost).  Both women are married:  Christine to Robert, Marquis de la Cheyniest (Marcel Dalio), Lisette to Schumacher (Gaston Modot), the gamekeeper on the Marquis’s country estate, La Colinière.  Whereas Christine has been having an extra-marital affair (a thing of the past, as far as she, though not André, is concerned), Lisette is devoted not to her husband but to her aristocratic employer.  Robert, well aware of his wife’s fling with the aviator, has a mistress of his own, Geneviève de Marras (Mila Parély).  He tells Geneviève he must end their relationship but nevertheless invites her to a weekend gathering at La Colinière.  Renoir (who also wrote the screenplay) efficiently contrives to assemble all his key characters there:  they also include, among others, Christine’s niece, Jackie (Anne Mayen), and Octave (played by Renoir himself), a droll, seasoned pillar of Parisian high society and friend of both Robert and Christine.  Octave persuades André Jurieux to join the party:  if he and Geneviève are attracted to each other, Octave reckons, this could relieve both Christine and Robert of their persistent paramours – could, to use a phrase apt in view of what happens on the country estate, kill two birds with one stone.

    The remaining action, which is the lion’s share of the film, takes place at La Colinière.  Much of the plot there is catalysed not by a guest but by an intruder, the poacher Marceau (Julien Carette), who trespasses onto the estate to retrieve a rabbit caught in a snare.  Schumacher apprehends Marceau and is about to eject him when Robert happens to intervene.  Marceau shoots a line that he’s good at catching rabbits; Robert gives him a job on the estate; once he’s in the house, Marceau, to Schumacher’s fury, starts flirting with Lisette.  As the romantic intrigues and deceptions multiply, Renoir stages two remarkable set pieces – a shooting party and a masked ball.  During the latter, new liaisons are born and old flames rekindled:  Christine decides to elope with André.   After an extended episode of zany chaos in the house – Schumacher chasing Marceau and threatening to shoot him is at its centre – the film’s climax is focused on a secluded greenhouse on the estate, late at night.  It’s here that Octave declares his love for Christine, who is already having (second) second thoughts about André.  Schumacher and Marceau, both fired instantly by Robert for wreaking havoc in the house, keep watch on the greenhouse; by now, Schumacher suspects Octave, rather than Marceau, of having designs on Lisette.  Christine decides on a different elopement, with Octave; when the moment comes, he loses his nerve and sends André back out to her.  Earlier in the film, when Schumacher proudly presented his wife with a cape and hood that he’d bought for her, Lisette was ungratefully sniffy about the outfit but, on this chilly night, insists that her mistress wear it for her outing to the greenhouse.  Octave lends his overcoat to André.  Schumacher can just about make out in the darkness two figures whose clothes identify them as Lisette and her latest seducer.  The gamekeeper shoots the man dead.  In the closing sequence, Robert, in characteristically off-the-cuff fashion, gives Schumacher his job back.  They return to the house as Octave and Marceau walk off into the night.  The Marquis will report André’s death to the police as an unfortunate accident.

    The film’s vicissitudes in its early life, though a significant part of its cachet, aren’t enough to obscure its intrinsic excellence.   The performances, decidedly but consistently theatrical, are highly accomplished.  Renoir’s orchestration of the various elements – the ramifying comedy of manners; the entertainments staged at the masked ball (including a skeleton routine, accompanied by Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre); the series of automata in the Marquis’s collection, each one that we see more disturbing than the last – is masterly.  So too the camera movement (the DP was Jean Bachelet), especially in conveying the crazy, escalating momentum of the ball and what’s happening at its margins.  Those automata both hint at the aristocrats’ blithe heartlessness and underline the sense of people playing parts in a social machinery.  Octave wears a bear costume for the ball; the sequence in which he struggles to remove it is eloquent.  The crucial shooting party scenes are as shocking as they’re brilliantly conceived and edited (by Marguerite Renoir, the director’s partner but never his wife, though she took his name).  The nobs wait while their army of servants drives into range pheasants and rabbits that inhabit La Colinière.  Needless to say, numerous animals and birds were actually killed in the process of filming the hunt, including, unforgettably, a wounded rabbit that shakes its scut and flexes its legs as it dies.

    Marceau’s description of André’s death – ‘He dropped like an animal in the hunt’ – is a rare over-explicit line in the script but the hunting episode came to acquire a far larger and horrifying human application.  The animal carnage on the estate has been linked, in retrospect, with what Nazi Germany did to all those they deemed sub-human.  Whatever the merits of that comparison, Renoir seems not to have been averse to the idea that The Rules of the Game presages the imminent World War.  On-screen text introducing the restored version of the film announces an ‘entertainment, set on the eve of the Second World War …’ – which leads into a roguish disclaimer that the piece ‘does not claim to be a study of manners.  Its characters are purely fictitious’.  (This is followed by lines from Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro, the source material of Mozart’s opera, in which – in a reverse of the Christine-Lisette costume confusion – the servant Susanna, Figaro’s bride to be, disguises herself as the Countess Rosa Almavina.)

    I have to admit I find The Rules of the Game more admirable than engaging.  There are two reasons (in addition to the spectacular animal casualties) why I don’t enjoy it much.  First, a limited appetite for frenzied farce action, however well choreographed; second, the people in the story.  Renoir has been quoted as saying that he ‘depicted pleasant, sympathetic characters, but showed them in a society in the process of disintegration’.  Even if social conditioning has shaped the dramatis personae, all but three of the major ones are hard for this viewer to like.  One of the exceptions is the ill-fated André, and he’s inoffensive rather than appealing:  it may or may not be a coincidence that Roland Toutain is a relatively bland presence in this high-powered cast.  The more positive exceptions are Gaston Modot’s understandably jealous Schumacher and the clownish but melancholy Octave, whose rueful perceptiveness is the moral heart of The Rules of the Game.  It’s right that Jean Renoir plays him.

    3 March 2023

Posts navigation