Stock up on tissues before you watch Close and schedule time for a restorative drink afterwards, because this is one of the most heartbreaking films you’ll see this year. As if offering a balm, it’s also one of the most formally beautiful, full of scenes shot in the slant sunlight of magic hour, punctuated by stretches of ringing silence and whispering organ music. Set over the cycle of a year, this is a film about loss but also healing, forgiveness and grace.
In a semi-rural corner of Belgium, two 13-year-old boys — Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) — have been friends since childhood. They still play-act together, pretending to be soldiers surrounded by the enemy in an old barn, and fall asleep together in the same bed or lay their heads on each other’s shoulders without any self-consciousness.
But when they start high school, everything changes. Female classmates ask, with the deceptive friendliness of mean girls, if Léo and Rémi are a couple because they’re so close. Terrified by the prospect of homophobic bullying, Léo pulls away from Rémi in tiny increments. He hangs out with other boys and fails to show up at the place they always meet to cycle together to school. The effect is devastating not just for the sensitive Rémi but for the guilt-ridden Léo.
Writer-director Lukas Dhont’s first, previous feature Girl (2018) was about a trans child who wants to be accepted as a ballerina, and Close too, in its own way, is about young people struggling with identity and searching for their place in the social order. The film hints that Léo or Rémi or maybe both might be gay, but nothing is spelt out.
Léo tries to keep all those complex, inchoate feelings tamped down, but the pain comes out in furtive flickers behind the eyes, tiny acts of violence. Dambrine’s performance is by some distance one of the most extraordinary by a child his age I’ve ever seen: tempered, tightly wound, as truthful as a flower.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from March 3
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