Laurent Cantet, Robin Campillo (2025)
Laurent Cantet and Robin Campillo’s friendship began in the 1980s, when both were students at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris; their film collaborations go back a long way, too. The pair shared (with François Bégaudeau) the screenplay credit on Cantet’s most celebrated film, The Class (2008). Campillo also edited that film and, over the next decade or so, was involved as writer and/or editor on three more Cantet features (Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (2012), Return to Ithaca (2014) and The Workshop (2017)). In recent years, Campillo has emerged as a highly successful writer-director in his own right, thanks to BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017) and Red Island (2023), but he and Cantet joined forces once more for Enzo. As Campillo explained in a Q&A following this screening on the opening night of the London Film Festival, Cantet asked his friend to read an early draft screenplay, with which Cantet wasn’t happy. Campillo thought better of it and encouraged Cantet to press on. At around the same time, Cantet was diagnosed with cancer. The two men eventually agreed that Cantet would continue with the project for as long as he could, with Campillo on hand to help and, if necessary, take over to see it through to completion (a necessary insurance policy for the production companies involved). In the event, Cantet died in April 2024, when Enzo had been cast but before filming had begun. The result of this final collaboration is termed, in both the opening and closing credits, a Laurent Cantet film, directed by Robin Campillo.
From the start, Enzo is what one has come to expect from Campillo (and even take for granted) – it’s strong on atmosphere, both physical and emotional. Like an earlier Cantet film, The Workshop, this one was shot on location in the coastal town of La Ciotat, in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of southern France. The film opens on a building site, where the sixteen-year-old title character is an apprentice bricklayer. Enzo (Eloy Pohu) is not a quick learner: his boss Corelli (Philippe Petit), showing his client round the work in progress, is so embarrassed by Enzo’s botch that without further ado he drives the boy home, intending to tell Enzo’s parents just what’s what. It comes as a surprise – to the viewer and, it seems, Corelli – that Enzo lives in a luxurious villa: gated entrance, well-stocked bookshelves, private swimming pool, spectacular sea view. (Perhaps a sharp-eared French audience will already have picked up clues to Enzo’s social background. Anglophone audiences will likely have made their own class-based assumptions about what sort of kid works on a building site.) Once Enzo’s parents, Paolo (Pierfrancesco Favino) and Marion (Élodie Bouchez), surface from their dip in the pool, Corelli switches from high dudgeon to more temperate criticism of the boy’s bricklaying potential. The scene is beautifully handled: it’s not a crudely obvious climbdown by the builder, rather than an adjustment to circumstances – socially credible yet humorous. After Corelli has left the villa, Enzo’s father aptly tells his son that his boss impressed him as ‘pragmatic’. But Enzo insists that he likes his job at the building site and wants to stick with it.
Although this sequence isn’t crucial in plot terms, I’ve described it in some detail because it’s typical of Campillo’s attentive, nuanced direction. What is crucial to the whole film, is Enzo’s determination to continue building work, which he’s packed in school to do – this despite the evidence of his intelligence and drawing talents, and his parents’ – especially his father’s – disappointment that Enzo won’t follow in the footsteps of their elder boy, Victor (Nathan Japy), who’s applying for a place at the super-prestigious Henri IV lycée in Paris. Enzo’s rejection of higher education reflects a stubborn sense of alienation from the values and expectations of his parents – academic father, engineer mother – and their ambitions for him and Victor. The building site will also be the seedbed of a relationship, with a co-worker, that is central to Enzo’s conviction that he doesn’t belong in a heteronormative world. The other men on Corelli’s team include two Ukrainians, Miroslav (Vladislav Holyk) and Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi). Vlad is first seen telling off Enzo for working too slowly on the concrete mixer then showing Miroslav phone pictures of a ‘hot’ girl that Vlad fancies. The phone gets passed round the other workers as they take their lunch break. Enzo points out that the girl’s face isn’t visible, prompting joshing questions from the rest of the group about his own sex life.
Miroslav and Vlad sometimes exchange angry words in their native language. The Ukrainian isn’t subtitled into English, of course: since Enzo doesn’t understand what’s being said, nor should we. One time, Miroslav explains to Enzo that they’re arguing about returning home to fight for their country, since they’re now in their mid-twenties; Vlad, however, tells Enzo that he’s not as old as Miroslav, so not obliged to do so. (Men are conscripted into Ukraine’s armed forces at the age of twenty-five.) In a pivotal moment in the story, Enzo accepts an invitation to accompany Vlad and Miroslav back to the apartment they share, to shower and share a pizza before going to a club. Clubbing is a big deal to Vlad; it’s important to look your best, he tells Enzo, lending him a shirt for the occasion. On arrival at the club, Vlad greets girls he knows there; the club manager asks Enzo’s age and doesn’t believe the lie (nineteen) he’s told in reply. Although Vlad briefly protests, Enzo doesn’t. He heads off on his motorcycle though he doesn’t return home for some time. Instead, he watches the sun set over the sea; later, he lies on his back, gazing at a starry sky to a soundtrack of cicadas (a continuing feature of the film’s outdoor scenes). His arrival at the villa wakes up his father, who was sleeping on a sofa: Paolo explains he was worried about Enzo. His son tells him about going to the club but not about being refused admittance or how he spent the rest of his evening, which, Enzo says, was the best of his life.
It’s typical of the film that not as much happened, in terms of incident, as Enzo’s remark implies. The same proves to be true of his relationship with Vlad in the longer term. For example, after a row at home, Enzo turns up another evening at the Ukrainians’ apartment, asking if he can stay over. Vlad agrees: as usual, Miroslav is at his girlfriend’s for the weekend so Enzo can sleep in the vacant bed. During the night, as Vlad lies asleep on the other side of the room, Enzo goes over to his bed and tentatively caresses Vlad’s chest. Vlad wakes, says, ‘Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’; Enzo obediently returns to Miroslav’s bed. The film is perhaps too uneventful and the very sad circumstances in which it was made could have something to do with that. Although Campillo worked with Laurent Cantet on developing the script, he and Gilles Marchand (another regular collaborator, who also gets a screenplay credit) may have been reluctant to push Cantet too hard or, after his death, to make changes to what was his last piece of writing. This hardly matters anyway since non-events in Enzo become another of its strengths. That was also the case, to a lesser extent, in Cantet’s The Workshop, where the set-up pointed to a violent climax that didn’t materialise, but Enzo is clearer on its main themes than that predecessor.
Films in which not much happens sometimes change their ways in the home straight, apparently nervous of frustrating the audience too much. The closing stages of Enzo repeatedly threaten to veer into melodramatic resolution but never do. Miroslav owns a gun that Enzo finds under the pillow of his bed-for-the-night and steals; out of control at his parents’ party to celebrate Victor’s getting a place at Henri IV, Enzo pulls the gun on his brother then puts it in his own mouth before laughingly telling Victor it’s a dummy weapon. Later in the evening, Enzo tells his parents that he and Vlad are lovers – ‘he fucks me’. In retrospect, Enzo’s bigging up to his father the evening spent at the club, feels like an innocent prelude to this flagrant, dangerous untruth. Paolo instantly wants to tell the police; Marion successfully calms her son down; Enzo admits he and Vlad haven’t had sex. Back at the building site, when he learns that Vlad is returning to Ukraine with Miroslav, Enzo falls – seemingly intentionally – from a considerable height. (The moment is remarkably filmed – an almost dreamlike suicide attempt.) He wakes up in hospital with no more than a broken wrist.
Enzo is very interesting in how it treats the two main characters’ sexuality: the sexual preferences of both are somewhat ambiguous, as are the reasons for that ambiguity. Enzo’s claiming to have had girlfriends may come across as saying what’s expected of him, but his relationship with Amina (Malou Khebizi) does have a physical dimension albeit Amina disappears from the film about halfway through. His parents, while seeming to assume their younger son is straight (as his elder brother evidently is), aren’t homophobic. Marion is entirely sympathetic when Enzo talks about his feelings for Vlad, Paolo openly hostile towards Vlad only when he temporarily thinks he’s a sexual predator. The parents would be happy to see Enzo studying art rather than bricklaying; and an art school, on the face of it, would seem a more congenial environment than a building site for a gay or bisexual teenager. Enzo is certainly at the site to defy normal expectations; more debatable is whether he’s there to turn himself into a real man, or to be in the company of real men, and with what end in mind. As for Vlad, he shows Enzo, on the same night that he stays over at the apartment, a phone video of himself and a girl in bed together. He obviously makes recordings of this kind as a means of asserting his masculinity, perhaps out of fear of his own gay proclivities. Yet when Enzo makes physical overtures to him, Vlad consistently tells him to back off.
Who makes the running in the relationship is another absorbing element of the story. This isn’t a case of a minor flirting carelessly and tempting a senior into doing something the latter knows he shouldn’t do. It’s Vlad who invites Enzo to the apartment, gets him dressed for clubbing, tells him he looks good. It’s Enzo who, subsequently and repeatedly, initiates intimate physical contact between them, to which Vlad doesn’t consent. In a phone conversation that ends the film, Vlad asks if Enzo was in love with him. Enzo says he thinks so. When Vlad pushes for a more definite affirmative, Enzo supplies it. Now far away in Ukraine, Vlad admits that he’s glad Enzo loved him. Yet this closing sequence also crystallises the film’s other central theme. The similarities and differences between Enzo and Vlad, in their sexual orientation, are open to more than one interpretation. It’s unarguable that, as well as now being geographically many miles apart, there has always been a gulf between them in terms of privilege.
Enzo is on holiday in Naples with his family, wandering round the ruins of Pompeii (or Herculaneum?) when his phone rings and he answers to hear Vlad’s voice. Enzo explains where he is, that he won’t be continuing with bricklaying and that he’ll soon be off to New York for a year because he needs to improve his English. The contrast in their final situations is made almost too stark: Vlad is in the thick of the war with Russia; Enzo hears an explosion as they talk; the film’s last line is Enzo’s ‘Are you there?’ when Vlad is seemingly no longer on the line. But Enzo throughout is more fortunate than the man he falls for (in more ways than one). Cantet and Campillo don’t suggest that Enzo’s allegiance to the building site was mere posturing, a whim of iron. They do make clear that his background – through his parents’ affluence and liberal-mindedness – gives Enzo choices and the possibility of experiment that are denied to Vlad.
Enzo’s finale brings to mind the last sequence in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017) – another long-distance phone conversation, though neither of the young male protagonists ends up in circumstances anything like as extreme as Vlad’s (and the situations of teenager and twentysomething are virtually reversed: the older man calls from America to announce his engagement to a woman, leaving his younger male lover heartbroken). There’s another semi-echo of the Guadagnino film in the figure of the teenager’s father. In both films, he’s an academic who seems to struggle to control his feelings: in Call Me by Your Name, it’s eventually implied that the father regretfully has repressed his own homosexuality; in Enzo, Paolo seems almost irrationally possessive of Enzo, in a way the boy’s less emotionally volatile mother isn’t. Like plenty more in Enzo, Paolo’s motivation is somewhat opaque, but none the worse for that, thanks to the dramatic tension that it yields. The Russo-Ukrainian war might seem to supply currency and gravity to a film that could otherwise appear too introverted. If that’s what was intended, I’m not sure it works: at any rate, Enzo’s curiosity about the war strikes a more effective note than Vlad’s eventual involvement in it. When Enzo watches online footage of the war and looks at images of Ukrainian soldiers, this comes across as part-and-parcel of his Vlad fantasies rather than political interest.
Robin Campillo said fascinating things in the post-screening Q&A led by BFI programmer Isabel Moir, who did well to ask Campillo first about how Enzo came to fruition, and about the mix of professional and non-professional actors in the cast. Campillo clearly made the film out of, as well as keen interest in its themes, a deep personal commitment and sense of responsibility to Laurent Cantet. Even so, Campillo admitted, he was less stressed than usual making Enzo because he didn’t feel it fundamentally was his film. Glossing the distinction between ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’, Campillo emphasised that ‘we’re looking for good actors’, whatever their previous acting experience might be. He described the very different first impressions made by Eloy Pohu and Maksym Slivinskyi, neither of whom had previous screen experience, at audition: Slivinskyi was eager and full of vitality, Pohu closed off and enigmatic. Those attributes are reflected in the two leads’ screen presences in the final film – and to great effect. Their complementary qualities as performers are invaluable to the story the film is telling – at first corresponding to the personalities of their characters but, as the narrative moves forward, seeming to counterpoint the characters’ hidden feelings. Robin Campillo thinks it’s important not fully to understand the people he puts on the screen: good actors, he said, reveal things a director didn’t realise at the outset, so that filmmaking is an education for the director as much as anyone else. That tenet is powerfully reflected in Enzo. Introducing the film, Isabel Moir pointed out that this would be – by a few minutes – the very first public screening at this year’s London Film Festival. What a difference a year makes (see Blitz!): this viewer will be fortunate if he sees a better film in the eleven days of the Festival ahead.
8 October 2025
