As Lukas Dhont’s Close opens, we are thrust into the idyllic summer world of Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi’s (Gustav De Waele) flowering friendship. Through a shared intimacy of imagination, play, tenderness, and trust, they relish in the ideal circumstances of their relationship. Free to frolic in fields of lush flowers, Léo and Rémi begin in an open space of social freedom, familial support, and camaraderie that presumes conditions of mutual love. However, the pleasant moments of their friendship soon yield to social pressures that challenge the nature of their relationship.
In the film, perceptions of heterosexuality are questioned in the context of pubescent communities where criticisms of queerness become a subject of social inquiry and disruptive to the conditions of platonic relationships. As a filmmaker, Dhont doesn’t overtly comment on the rights of Queer or heteronormative communities. Queer theory rejects such ideological binaries. Instead, he presents a tale of friendship, challenged by sexual identity and adolescent social groups who often deem burgeoning sexuality as a site of both intrigue and scrutiny.
Dhont’s 2018 debut, Girl, follows Lara (Victor Polster) as she navigates the social and internal pressures of adolescent transgender experiences while aspiring to be a ballerina. Like his first film and with Close, Dhont continues his narrative interest in the challenges of sexual identity in young people. While Girl focuses on the trans experience of a young woman dealing with issues of self-harm and gender dysphoria, Close approaches another point of sexual and gender identity. In this story, the assumed queerness of two ostensibly heterosexual boys challenges the true intimacy of their bond. Léo and Rémi endure inquiries and criticisms from their peers, generating issues in how they view themselves.
As a member of the Queer community, Dhont’s authorship in these two films brings them into the realm of New Queer Cinema — coined by B. Ruby Rich. However, Dhont’s debut and sophomore features do skirt the line of this filmmaking movement when compared to other notable Queer films from filmmakers like Gregg Araki, Todd Hanyes, and Gus Van Sant.
While Lara is situated in the Queer community, in terms of her trans experience, her gender identity as a woman and sexual interest in men bespeak a more heterosexual interest. There is a moment in Girl where she suggests considering an interest in women, but this is more of a deflective comment in response to her father’s personal inquiries about her love life. As we see, her identity embraces conventions about femininity as she endeavors to find comfort in her transition.
In turn, the protagonists in Close are assumed to be Queer by their peers without ever being fully explicated. Based on these characterizations, Dhont’s narratives appear to operate at the periphery of Queer experience and interrogate how the boundaries of sexual identity and socialization impact young teenagers. Their notions of femininity and masculinity are tested at the threshold of childhood and adulthood. In his original conceptions of Close, Dhont wrote one of the boys as Queer but later decided to downplay this representation and instead focus on their relationship outside of a limited romantic context. In other words, Dhont doesn’t turn to the Queer experience as the main thesis of his film. Instead, he attends to the experiences of early adolescence and the emotional challenges of this transitory period of life.
It is worth noting, however, that Girl was the recipient of the Queer Palm and the Camera d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Although Girl is also one of the few award winners in this category, along with last year’s Queer Palm winner Joyland, to deal directly with trans characters. Festival interest in Dhont proved favorable four years after his debut, with Close sharing the Grand Prix award with Claire Denis’ Star at Noon. As such, the film partially addresses issues of queerness but in less direct ways than New Queer Cinema.
In Close, the closeness of Léo and Rémi shifts from the soft privacy of their bedside conversations to the more judgemental community space of their new school environment. This is expressed formally at the onset of their first moments in arriving at secondary school. Their journey to school showcases a tracking shot of Léo and Rémi riding their bikes with euphoric optimism. Their two-shot framing echoes an earlier scene of the boys sprinting through the floriculture farm where Léo’s family works. Once they arrive at school, the camera slowly zooms out as the boys warily survey and try to navigate the recreation yard. As the camera pulls back, revealing more and more children, the two become more absorbed in the crowd, i.e., more disorienting communal spaces disrupt their coupling.
Léo and Rémi’s physical closeness quickly provokes the attention of their classmates, who inquire about the nature of their relationship. While initially amused, Léo becomes defensive when a group of young girls continues to levy comments about his relationship with Rémi. This gossip inspires a growing disconnect in Léo and Rémi’s friendship, which is most apparent from Léo’s end. The two slowly become quieter and more distant from one another. Amid this minor rift, their male classmates become increasingly hostile and derogatory toward them. The other boys’ offensive homophobic slurs and bullying push Léo and Rémi farther apart, as their frustrations disrupt the validity of their relationship. This unwanted scrutiny owes, in part, to the open intimacy of their friendship — typically deemed a more feminine social dynamic. But other features, like Rémi’s demure demeanor and Léo’s somewhat androgynous visage, also separate the two from conventional characteristics attributed to masculinity.
As Léo begins making friends with other boys and pursuing sports like ice hockey, he distances himself from Rémi and becomes more dismissive of him. There are some suggestions that one or both of the boys feel an underlying Queer sexuality (as suggested in the early promotion of the film). Still, Dhont deliberately downplays this sexual aspect to privilege the importance of their other qualities of sensuality and intimacy. Rémi’s emotional vulnerability at this growing separation builds to an altercation in the schoolyard with Léo, and both boys walk away shaken by their aggressive conflict. The fallout of this incident soon has major dramatic consequences that shatter their relationship forever.
Self-harm, an issue also present in Girl, becomes a poignant aspect of this story, and while Lara survives her corporeal inflictions, one of the boys here does not recover the same. This brings a crucial question to Dhont’s frequent and, perhaps, troubling depictions of young teenagers driven to self-harm. Is this an inappropriate manipulation of acute drama, or does this direction speak earnestly to issues present within these patterns of behavior that do exist alarmingly among adolescents? I am inclined to believe the latter. Dhont’s research and consideration of this material are provocative but not without proper deliberation. His choice to avoid graphic imagery in Close seems to be a positive step toward decency instead of depicting harmed bodies. Close is not as concerned with sexuality or representation as it is with platonic intimacy, loss, and forgiveness.
The film’s shift recalls similarly structured films like Trey Edward Schults’ Waves. Each story is divided by a severe dramatic incident, and the intimacy and closeness that is lost due to miscommunication, indignance, peer pressure, and death must come to terms with itself and rediscover love and connection as a means of healing. The willingness for one to be close again charges the characters suffering in the wake of lost loved ones to be vulnerable and to love again. The performances throughout the film elevate its sensitive subject matter.
In their inaugural film debuts, leads Dambrine and De Waele approach their characters with candor and delicacy. Their respective mothers, Nathalie (Léa Drucker) and Sophie (Émilie Dequenne) give affecting performances, along with Rémi’s father, Peter (Kevin Janssens). These adults are mainly shown grieving, but their approach to the material avoids being melodramatic or spurious. Issues of loss shown in Close never feel less than veritable, which helps validate its potentially questionable material regarding suicide. Throughout this story, our focus remains chiefly on the children.
Aesthetically, Close has a very naturalistic quality, owing to its character-driven story, minimal score, loose narrative structure, handheld camerawork, natural lighting, and in privileging quieter moments of dramatic action — most often in Dhont’s attention to facial responses to offscreen dialogue. Mark Kermode expresses in his review, “the whole register of the film is very understated,” as it endeavors to convey this initially blissful evocation of childhood. Often scenes will begin in medias res, shifting around the narrative to punctuate essential moments of drama. These formal aspects of the film give the story a sense of freedom, as the loose pacing of the narrative aligns with a childlike sense of curiosity, uncertainty, and discovery.
As Dhont focuses primarily on the boys, with adults mainly serving as peripheral figures in the first half of Close, the film is adjacent to a child-centric mode of cinema. This notion attributes to various formal characteristics that focus on stories about children and are cinematically enmeshed in their perceptions and dedicated to their agency.
In discussing a very different child-centric filmmaker, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Tim Palmer conveys that “child-centric cinema is entirely calibrated by vivid non-adult subjectivity, whose deep curiosity about, yet brittle mastery over, unstable diegetic worlds,” instills a lyrical quality in its visual articulations. While Dhont’s drama differs from Hadžihalilović’s more oneiric, art-cinema body of films, he does draw on noticeable aspects of a child-centric mode. He focuses on social spaces composed almost exclusively of children, the intimate and confusing interactions that occur in both domestic and natural settings, and elliptical editing rhythms that disorient linear time. Hadžihalilović’s films do exhibit far more visual and narrative abstractions than Close. However, both films importantly address social and environmental changes that have profound emotional effects on children.
This is a crucial aspect of a child-centric mode — children are physically and emotionally unmoored by the uncertainties of the adult world. Close’s central drama stems from emotional tensions triggered by the loss of childhood at the cusp of adolescence. This is the story of the two boy’s friendship deconstructed in the face of hetero-masculine social pressures and anxieties about perceived queerness. However, the potential Queer nature of their relationship is left ambiguous, as Dhont emphasizes their intimacy with more non-sexual openness.
While the dimensions of Queer Cinema are often blurred in the film, Close deals with negative socialization issues at the tender age of preadolescence. Often at this stage in children’s lives, pressures of virility overshadow the openness of affection between young boys that had existed in their earlier years without question. The difficult transition into adolescence and the hetero-cultural pressures that come with this have been shown to upend relationships in which love does not necessitate labels or sexual identity. As the initial tenderness of Léo and Rémi is contrasted with seeds of aggression, resentment, and isolation in their friendship, they must deal with the negative pressures of heterosexual manhood and how habits in that culture often levy ignorant and critical attitudes toward Queer identities.
Queer and non-binary perspectives often resist hetero-normative forms of storytelling and the damaging social attitudes that they can often promote. While this is important regarding ethics and social inclusion, I don’t find Close to be a declarative critique of heterosexuality. Rather, the film spotlights how these misguided attitudes can threaten alternative sexual or gender identity outlooks. Most importantly, Close shows how peer pressure can intimidate genuine feelings of intimacy.
Just as Girl ignited important critical commentary on the ethics of cis-authorship in telling trans stories, Close comes as another sensitive project, in which Dhont investigates pubescent sexual identities with an earnest interest in the emotional fickleness of adolescence. He explores how this formative time in one’s life proves extremely delicate in how people develop their self-identity in the face of peer pressure, self-doubt, and rejection. In response to LGBTQ+ considerations of the film, Dhont pointedly shares that “it’s not about their sexuality, it’s about how their intimacy and their sensuality are looked upon and how we are conditioned to look at it.”
In addition to exploring issues of masculinity and friendship, Dhont expresses a keen interest in the crucial intersection of childhood and puberty that occurs in young men’s lives. He discusses how the language of friendship begins to change significantly under social pressures and how “at that moment, we are all confronted with the microcosmos of our society.” He further shares that norms and codes associated with certain groups express vertical differences and don’t celebrate the openness of relationships as childhood does. The film thus examines the shift from “that idyllic childhood love that has no border” to the forces of a young adult-oriented society that encourage difference and individualism. What becomes lost to Léo and Rémi is this overarching sense of intimacy and freedom in their relationship.
There are implications of intimate feelings which may be sexually charged, from Rémi’s perspective, but this is not the main focus of Close. Once more, as Dhont expresses in his reflections on the Queer aspects of the film, the story is more about the young male experience, generally, and not limited to just the Queer experience. Close appears less about explicit Queer representation and more about the nature of intimacy for a young friendship — how deep friendships and closeness are as fragile as they are profound. Léo’s rejection of intimacy from Rémi — in light of social pressure to embody masculine normalcy as virility — leads to tragedy. The closeness that once bonded the boys is traded for irreparable damage to their relationship.
In contrast, the familial bonds that had nurtured this platonic love have a say in healing its loss. Close shies away from sexuality, instead specifically focusing on non-sexual intimacy of a profound platonic attachment. While Dhont is undoubtedly a Queer filmmaker in his sexual identity, his films appear more inclined to navigate social tragedies and hardships that exist at the periphery of New Queer Cinema.
His work, while ethically dubious, at times, probes at something deeper than apparent issues of sexuality. At a general level, he looks to adolescent social identity, exploring the bonds that both encourage us to understand ourselves and equally threaten to dismantle our very sense of being. The urgency, tolerance, and self-love that come through genuine closeness are something we cannot neglect. Like Léo and Rémi, in their halcyon days of summer, we must nurture the ties that make us close to ourselves and to others. Close charges us to accept and appreciate love in the term’s broadest sense.
