'Close', a moving look at the fragility of preadolescence

2022-11-25T22:02:19.683Z

The Belgian Lukas Dhont signs a devastating drama about the truncated friendship of two boys who are like brothers until they enter high school

Lukas Dhont has said that he felt the vertigo of the second film after the success of

Girl

, the story of a trans teenager who wants to be a dancer with whom he won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 2018. Lost, he took refuge in his mother's house.

It was she who gave him valuable advice: his new film should tell what he didn't dare in the first one, the exact place of a pain that, autobiographical or not, it doesn't matter, was his.

It is difficult to find a moment of greater fragility and at the same time splendor than pre-adolescence and

Close

, the second film by this promising 31-year-old Belgian filmmaker, sums it up in a moving way through a career that begins with the flight of a children's game and it culminates with the look of an already adult child.

Between both points an infinite field of flowers expands, a metaphor for those broken flowers that this disconsolate film talks about.

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the prison of the body

Close

won the Grand Jury Prize at the last Cannes festival.

It was one of the most consensus films, a devastating drama about the broken friendship of two boys who are like brothers until they enter high school.

With skin-deep sensitivity, Lukas Dhont films the arrival of his two characters on bicycles on the first day of school, a shot that opens up to a panoramic view of the bustle and excitement of their new reality: a playground where , without a single word or gesture of more, everything is said.

They are no longer alone and the game is over.

A microcosm that could be, from different proposals, the other side of the debut of the also Belgian Laura Wandel,

A Small World

(2021), which offered a devastating immersion in

bullying

of a playground through the eyes of a little girl who discovers the violence suffered by her bullied brother.

The bravery of that child is now measured with that pre-adolescent cruelty whose need for social acceptance leads to betraying everything.

But

Close

is not a movie about

bullying

, its theme is the shadow of masculinity from the tenderness of masculinity.

A painful inner pulse invoked in those ice hockey games in which one of the boys vents his fears and guilt on him.

Lukas Dhont strikes a remarkable balance.

With one foot in the tradition of the most admirable Belgian social cinema, he ventures into another terrain: that of melodrama.

In fact, the music and the saturated colors of the field flowers play a key emotional role that explicitly breaks with that tradition.

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The umbilical cord with the Dardenne brothers —whose school of rough and modest cinema, with natural actors always full of truth, has just given such admirable fruit as

Tori and Lokita,

a naked film that makes us feel ashamed of the horror experienced by many undocumented African children—is established through the mother of

Close's most vulnerable child,

played by Émilie Dequenne, the same actress from

Rosetta,

the film that in 1999 won the first Palme d'Or from the Dardennes, opening the floodgates of social cinema in the 21st century.

Both Émilie Dequenne and the French actress Léa Druckerson are, together with their two children on the screen (the wonderful Gustav de Waele and, above all, Eden Dambrine), the four pillars of a film interpreted with astonishing delicacy.

And so, with one eye on the most spartan Belgian school, Dhont turns the other eye on his nemesis, the cradle of his own sentimental upbringing.

In an interview for the recent Seville festival, where the film also won the Grand Jury Prize and Eden Dambrine for best actor, the director assured that he discovered that he wanted to be a filmmaker in order to move his mother as much as he had. made

Titanic,

the James Cameron film that served as a refuge for his mother during her divorce, when he was a child.

From that tension, in a place of its own that transcends those contradictions, this captivating and sad film is born.