Starring: Eden Dambrine, Gustav de Waele, Emilie Dequenne, Lea Drucker
Distributor: Madman Entertainment
Runtime: 104 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2023
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This subtitled Belgium film dramatically depicts the close relationship that is formed between two best-friends. The film deals sensitively with youth suicide.
This coming-of-age drama was awarded the Grand Prix at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, and won the award for Best Foreign Language Film from the National Board of Review in the same year. The film was co-written by the director, Lucas Dhont, who was inspired by Niobe Way’s book, Deep Secrets (2011), which deals with intimacy among teenage boys. The film has been nominated for an Oscar for Best International Feature Film in 2022.
Leo and Remi are both 13 years old and have developed an especially close relationship with each other. Their friendship is commented on negatively by their peers and throws their relationship into disarray. Both Leo (Dambrine), and Remi (de Waele) experience cruel and unkind comments. The harassment questions the intimacy they have formed together, and both are affected by the slights. Leo separates himself from Remi which puts a temporary stop to the harassment, but the separation causes Remi to suicide.
The film is an unforgettable portrait of how friendship and love is deeply influenced by the heartbreak that accompanies harassment, and how harassment needs to be resolved to facilitate healing. The film targets the trauma of Remi’s suicide for Leo and becomes an elegy to lost innocence, and it offers an incredibly moving story about heartbreak and loss. The film analyses why Leo felt he had to distant himself from his closest friend. It delivers strong and compelling messages about the biases that exist in a homophobic world, and it does so with great psychological force.
The film confronts firmly entrenched societal assumptions about masculinity. When Remi experiences biases, they erode his innocence, and he struggles to behave in appropriate ways. In his struggle, he battles with uncertainty and insecurity. When Leo stops talking to Remi, the film becomes a tale of compelling grief, and the families of Leo and Remi provide a powerful accompaniment to the heartbreak that affected their children, and now themselves. The acting of Dequenne as Remi’s grief-stricken mother is outstanding.
The cinematography uses changes in colour to reflect the tone of emotional moods, which illustrate the conflicts in relationships that are occurring, and the pain which is engendered. The acting of the two boys is outstanding. The film is ultimately about the necessity of healing.
The film exquisitely depicts the loss of childhood innocence, and the growth needed to cope with personal loss. It doesn’t focus at all on sexual intimacy, but on the challenges young people face in the distinctive forms of ‘closeness’ they forge. To help Remi cope, Leo finds ways of making Remi believe he no longer fits in with his life, as he did before, and what eventuates from Leo pushing Remi away is brilliantly captured by the director. The film illustrates the tragic damage caused by innuendo as it affects the innocence of closeness, and the film insightfully comes to grips with gender-identity.
Dambrine gives a particularly compelling, unselfconscious performance as Leo. The film addresses the subtle layers of experience that can characterise male childhood, and is a movie that will linger long in memory for the insights it creates.
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