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 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 both surprised and confused 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 terms of either Rémi’s parents’ loss of their adored only child or the furnace guilt of Léo’s horror at what may be – what he certainly sees as – the consequences of his actions, let alone 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 – but 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 to see their parents waiting to collect them. These details succeed in creating foreboding but are unrealistic: instructing parents to meet their children would 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 and all but one have done so, the inside of the vehicle is left clear for Léo to confront 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.
I couldn’t tell from either the characters’ clothes or other aspects of their world if the action was set in the present day or getting on for twenty years ago, when Lukas Dhont was in his vulnerable early teens. The absence of mobile phones in the film is noticeable, though, and I wondered if smart 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. Léo makes his way through the fields to Rémi’s parents’ home to find it empty: we understand 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
