February 25th, 2023

The sun in the blooming Belgian fields and the harmony of the clarinet accompany the transcendental friendship between two 13-year-old boys. Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) are inseparable and complementary, like flowers receiving the sun's rays or musical instruments caressing attentive ears. In the first part of the film, we are invited into the intimacy of this pure first love, where soldiers' games, races between plantations and mutual admiration set the tone for director Lukas Dhont's delicate storytelling.

In the family context, the boys find no impediment to explore their feelings. Léo sleeps daily at his friend's house, where the moments spent together reinforce their bond, suggesting the unbreakable strength of this relationship. Everything changes when they both arrive at school and face homophobia and bullying from their classmates. Accustomed to physical contact, Léo and Rémi do not hide their intimacy during their first days at school, something they do not see as strange or inappropriate. However, the school environment proves to be a demanding place for certain behavioral expectations, pushing them towards a compulsory heterosexuality.  Like a summer that comes to an end, taking with it the warmth and expansion of lives that pulse under the sun, the second part of the film is marked by rain, cold, darkness and the absence of Rémi.

What was once a story of adolescent love and discovery becomes the journey of a 13-year-old boy dealing with the grief and remorse of having abandoned his best friend. Rémi is depicted from the beginning of the film to be a vividly sensitive boy, a character that manifests itself through his dedication to the clarinet, fearlessness in talking about his feelings, and outburst of anger the first time Léo doesn't wait for him to ride his bike to school together. "You usually wait for me, but this time you left me," the boy exclaims before having a fit of crying and rage against his friend. Léo, for his part, chooses the side of the bullies, and to protect himself from bullying he distances himself from Rémi and joins the school hockey team.

Previously, the boys' friendship differed from other relationships in many ways, including speech. The dialogues between the two were in French, as opposed to Dutch, the official language of the school. When Rémi decides to leave, outer and inner silence accompany Léo in his search for acceptance, the most important of which is to be who he is and to accept that his friend will not be present in the sorrows and joys to come. 

In his second feature film, 31-year-old Lukas Dhont dazzled audiences and critics around the world with his poetic treatment of a simple and transcendental theme such as the friendship between two boys, while the performances of Eden and Gustav elevated the project with their brutal naturalness in conveying the complexities of adolescent passions.

A must-see film to say the least. In patriarchal societies, where masculinity is defined and demanded as only one: strong, violent and detached from feelings, the tears that run down the cheeks of Rémi, his father, and Léo, when he realizes he has made a bad choice, reveal to us multiple, healthy and viscerally more human masculinities.

Watch the trailer here.

#close #belgium #belgiancinema #adolescence #masculinitie #teenagehood #youth #boys #french #dutch