For someone as tired and cynical as me, who thought cinema was washed-up as a medium, this is difficult to say. But here goes.
Lukhas Dhont and Angelo Tijssens' Close (2022) is a flawless film. An instant - yes, I'm going to use that cliche - classic. It is simply... astonishing. It took my breath - and all my clever-swine defences - away. I have never seen a film quite like it. (And is worth more than a zillion episodes of Heartstopper.)
Oscar-nominated (though, luckily, I wasn’t aware of that when I watched it) Close tells the story, in an understated but entirely mesmerising way, of an intimate and carefree friendship in rural Belgium between Leo and Remi, two 13-year-old boys, which doesn't survive contact with the prejudice and jealousy of their peers.
There is no plot to speak of. You know everything that is going to happen before it happens. There is barely any dialogue. And yet it is entirely gripping - and the ending is as moving as it was obvious.
The performances are incredible, particularly that of Eden Dambrine as Leo, whose big, wide, almond eyes fill the screen for most of the film, providing a window to his boyish soul - and a mirror to the viewer's.
Close was listed as ‘LGBTQ’ on Prime Video, but the film itself is more ambiguous than the categorisation suggests. It's very possible one or both boys might be LGBTQetc, but that isn’t really addressed: it is the perception of them as such that causes the problem. Close is a film about the tricky transition from boyhood to adolescence, innocence to adulthood, and the repressive demands of masculinity. Yes it’s ‘about homophobia’, but also about the way that homophobia is used to police all male-male intimacy.
Close carefully hints at the jealousy that both boy and girl peers feel for their friendship. Which is why this story seems so startling - in the past it would have been seen as just 'part of growing up'. A ‘storm in a teacup’. Very sad, but best forgotten. Definitely not something to make a feature film about.
Leo's shame is spawned is when a group of girls at school insistently ask of him and Remi "are you a couple?" With the passive-aggressive follow-up, "It's just a question!". (The other boys are more direct in expressing their resentment: shoving them and calling them “faggots”.)
Once Leo has seen his shining friendship through the shaming eyes of his peers, he can’t unsee it. Leo's shame, first about his friendship with Remi, then about his rejection of Remi - and his inability to express any of it, along with his attempts to manfully repress it all instead - is the internal drama of the movie. Remi doesn’t say very much, but, boy, those eyes do.
And the guilt is after all something universal. Most of us have vague, ghostly memories of childhood friendships where we, to quote Wilde, killed the thing we loved.
You can stream Close here.