Lukas Dhont | Close / 2022

scheherazade

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lukas Dhont and Angelo Tijssens (screenplay), Lukas Dhont (director) Close / 2022

Belgian director Lukas Dhont’s film Close in many respects appears to be a simple tale told in a manner that allows its characters to be seen as full-bodied and complex human beings. And as such it seems to be an easy film to admire, particularly since its two major figures, the 13-year-old farm boys Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) are so beautiful to look at and such capable child actors as filmed by cinematographer Frank van den Eeden against a stunningly resplendent background of the Flanders flower fields. The work was beloved by audiences at Cannes at its very first showing where it was nominated for a Palme d’Or and Queer Palm and won the prestigious Grand Prix, with awards from the Sydney, Hamptons, Chicago, and Seville film festivals quickly following.

      The film, moreover, if it is about anything, concerns innocent love, the kind only young children can bestow upon one another without regard to issues of sex and even gender. In fact, such a love is perhaps almost now impossible in an age when children learn quickly through the internet and other sources about sex and experience the world far more through media than these boys do. At times, accordingly, it almost appears as if these close friends, spending their last full summer together before the beginning of secondary school—almost always a traumatic moment for youth—live in another time. Instead of playing on-line video games or constantly texting with their friends on cell-phones they play imaginative games about their world being inhabited by enemy soldiers or monsters from whom they must make a quick get-away by running full force through the fields of weeds and asters. In this seemingly lost rural world, Léo and Rémi rule over a summery place where there are no boundaries, the boys sharing a bed in one or the other of their parents’ homes, and being equally accepted wherever they wind up after a day of their adventures. 

     They love one another as they love their own bodies—thin and tanned through bicycling and running—with the absolute pleasure of simply being able jump, wrestle, and rest their heads upon one another’s chest. They sleep together in a single bed, Léo often telling fabulous tales that spin together disconnected elements in the manner of Scheherazade to help Rémi, the somewhat meeker and fragile of the two, to sleep, the boys ending up in the hugging position of spoons and lovers. 

      If dark-haired Rémi is perhaps the less athletic of two, he is also the more artistically talented, playing oboe as Léo watches him in absolute delight. Léo attempts to sketch Rémi but can only produce a caricature which both boys realize is simply silly. Both idolize one another, just as they idolize their mothers, particularly Léo who seems as close to Rémi’s mother Sophie (Émilie Dequenne) as she is to her own son. The many frames early in Dhont’s film devoted to their seemingly endless summer do not attempt to represent their love but simply documents it just as they would never even attempt to define it.

      In his intelligent review in Philadelphia Gay News critic Gary M. Kramer predictably argues:

 

“Close never explicitly addresses the teens’ sexuality, but reading the film, both boys are gay, and only one is comfortable with his sexuality.” *

 

     So they may be from our point of view, but in their innocent world—so difficult for most of us to remember and which many of us have may have not even known—they do not even imagine the necessity of defining their relationship. They have utterly no concept of homosexuality or even sexuality. Their world is Edenic.

      Enter the serpent in the form of another secluded and seemingly idealized world, educational institutions, in this case the dreaded secondary form, filled with children who have not at all spent their summers in Eden, and who very much know what their “closeness” might mean in what they imagine is the adult world which they attempt to emulate. Enter these two boys still holding hands and resting their heads on one another’s shoulders stage left as the other children look on in fascination, curiosity, and horror. The girls, generally slightly more mature than boys, begin with the questions: “What is their relationship? “Are they a couple? “Are they lovers?” While Rémi, so wrapped up in his private world of himself and Léo, sees no need to answer to outsiders, Léo, more reliant on the world outside himself, denies any of their definitions, simply expressing their relationship as a close friendship like that of brothers. And in his confused expression, we can already begin to sense that Rémi feels somewhat scorned in his lover’s—for him a true lover, not necessarily a sexual lover—remarks.

        But the boys—getting wind of the girl’s questions—who have been taught at home or from their peers far cruder labels for such different relationships, describe them almost immediately with words that Léo perhaps does even understand but senses their hurtfulness, such as “faggots” and “queers.” And in self-protection, an innate and often unthinking reaction, Léo begins to pull himself away from the friend he loves to be more like the others, moving out of position so that in recess Rémi cannot rest his head, as usual, on his stomach. For long periods he doesn’t speak to Rémi, and in one of the worst hurts of all, he befriends the very boys who have labeled their relationship, joining up with hockey-team players even though he is far from being talented in that sport. At recess, he plays soccer with his new friends, while Rémi hangs out with whoever will befriend him.

      For a short while, away from the schoolyard, the boys attempt to hang on to their shifting friendship, trying to restore it, quite unsuccessfully, for moments, before Léo’s embarrassment—both about their relationship and because of his gradual abandonment of it—resumes. One night as they lay in the same bed, Léo suddenly rises and moves to the bed on the floor originally laid out for Rémi, and in the morning the two boys begin a fight over the incident that starts out as a kind of tease but ends in true violence and anger, as Léo commands Rémi to sleep in his own bed.

     Eventually, Léo stops sleeping over at his friend’s house. The next morning, Rémi inexplicably to his somewhat unobservant mother, breaks down in tears at the breakfast table over the escalating situation.

    Writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Amil Niazi perfectly expresses my feelings about what happens soon after:

    

“After some tense moments – moments where I had to hold my breath because they brought back such intense pubescent memories – there are fights, confrontations and finally all-out screaming matches as the two come to grips over what it means to hold and love and be with someone so intimately in full view of the world, however small that world may be. It is devastating for anyone who can recall how much the pain of losing a friendship can feel at that age.”

 

      And suddenly, without full explanation as such incidents generally are, Rémi, as Léo’s mother attempts to abstract the truth, "is no more," evidently having committed suicide. Léo rushes off in horror, nearly running all the way home, but stopping off first just to peer into Rémi’s home as if in disbelief of the facts. No one seems to be there, while a bathroom door clearly broken into suggests where the event may have happened.

      At this point the film shifts, at first quite predictably as the various mourners wander about in a kind of daze attempting to explain a reality they can perceive as only a nightmarish dream. There are no answers, although they seek desperately for them, Léo observing from his classroom window Rémi’s mother Sophie arriving at school one day to remove all the objects from his locker.

     One night, unable to sleep, Léo crawls into his brother’s bed whispering out an overriding question that the adults are also surely asking, do you think they have found something he left behind, presumably which might answer all their questions.

But Léo knows the answers, although he cannot face them and perhaps doesn’t even realize the full truth. It is hard for us to remember he still a boy of 13, not fully cognizant of such a concept by which we might describe his “guilt.” In his young mind, he has only done what he was seemingly been called upon to do, to reach out to the larger world which he had entered in attending school. He has behaved as all the others has encouraged him to.

     But now the director seems to suggest that something else must happen, a tale he so languidly tells that we feel he is somewhat toying with us by taking us again and again to the brink to Léo’s coming to terms with his own actions.

     In a provocative essay on RogerEbert.com, critic Matt Zoller Seitz brings up this matter in what he describes as a problem in the film which ultimately clouds over all the wonderful filmmaking that proceeded it.

 

“But what does it [the movie] find and show once it has gone there? That's the question I have no good answer to.

     This is, when you get down to it, the story of a horrible thing that happened, that nobody who actually helped cause it can understand (or shows any sign of even wanting to understand), that no one in the dead boy's immediate circle saw coming or could have prevented, and that smashes two families' understanding of themselves to pieces. And it leaves poor Léo carrying around an unimaginable and (for him) mystifying burden: he feels like this is all his fault, even though it isn't. The movie generates suspense by making us wonder when Léo is finally going to tell Sophie that (in his mind) he caused her loss. It finally happens in the last ten minutes of the story, and the dead boy's family immediately leaves town, and the film ends with poor Léo looking into their now-empty house.”

 

     Seitz suggests that Dhont’s film is ultimately without purpose, unfulfilling, and even cruel in its last section as we wait impatiently for Léo to realize what part he has played in the events. He questions to what purpose do the writers and director take us there. What does Dhont want us to learn in the process of the boy’s final acceptance of guilt?

     Of course, that presumes that all films have an argument, a message that we might, at film’s end, package up and take home. I’d argue that Dhont’s film is not at all that kind of movie. As I mentioned earlier, this director documents a situation that occurs in varying ways over and over again in the heteronormative societies in which we live. There are no solutions, no answers to effectively provide the viewer except the now oft-repeated LGBTQ doctrine that homophobia must be shamed out of existence. Yet we know that surely hatred and bullying will never entirely disappear since being gay will stand always, given its numbers, in a minority, apart from the “majority sexual behavior.”

     And we know well that even Léo coming to terms with his own actions will offer no solution to the problem. Admittedly, I too grew frustrated with the long last third of this beautiful film in its seeming incessant toggling between Léo’s self-revelation and his attempts to escape that truth.  At one point Sophie comes to watch him practicing hockey, Léo moving over to her and even expressing his happiness to see her. It seems he is about to speak, but he suddenly grows cold and hurries away to the showers. At another point when Sophie and her husband are sharing dinner with his family, after gentle questioning about how things are with them, the husband suddenly breaks down in sobs, Sophie wandering off with Léo joining her, surely now realizing how much Rémi’s parents are still suffering; but he still does not speak up. And on yet another occasion, Léo visits Sophie while she is alone at home, and this time even asks if he might look at Rémi’s room, seeking out objects as if they might reveal something, she even commenting on several of the boy’s papers spread across the bed that she has looked through everything—presumably to find some explanation for what happened. But suddenly Léo, scarred off, prevaricates by saying that he has something to do at home.

      Even more frustrating to me as a viewer is that between each of these incidents, Léo returns to the hockey rink to play the tough macho game with the other boys he has chosen over Rémi, falling again and again on the ice or crashing into the stands head first, his coach urging him, like all those who train young men in how to suffer the violence they are expected as males to suffer, to stand up and move ahead: “Get up Léo, you’re doing good.” But Léo is not doing good, and at one point he falls over several times and again until he has no choice but to skate off without returning to the “game”—which is, after all, what studying such survival methods truly is.

       Part of the problem is that Léo is not yet fully aware of what he actually has done. He cannot take on responsibility until he grows enough to know that humans are indeed responsible for their relationships with each other. For a long while, Léo only knows that he has not behaved like he once did toward his friend. Only when he begins to truly miss Rémi, to realize that there is no one quite like him—something he comes to realize, in part, by spending a night sleeping over at the home of one of his hockey player friends—can he begin to comprehend that he has helped to destroy the world he and Rémi inhabited, and further, that he has pushed his friend away from his own love.

      The painful scene when Léo finally travels all the way to town by bus to visit Sophie in the hospital where she works, and the voyage home in her car, doesn’t “answer” anything. Sophie in turn, pushes her “other son” away, forcing him to get out of the car. The boy, now utterly at odds, rushes off into the woods feeling more unloved that he might ever before imagined possible and, yes, finally realizing that his actions have put him in that place. Fortunately, Sophie quickly recalls that she, as an adult, is not permitted such childlike behavior and comes looking for him, as they both hug one another in tears of forgiveness for their mutual rejection of others.

       But no, it does not answer for anything that has happened. When Léo again visits the house, Rémi’s family have moved away. And the last painful view we have of the boy is as he turns back to look over his shoulder at the camera with a remorseful half-smile that we realize will perhaps never leave his face. But his tale has been told. Like Scheherazade, telling endless and incredible tales such as he used to tell Rémi, his story itself (and in the end, it is Léo’s story) perhaps is the boy's true talent, his gift to us and others. He provides no solutions, but in telling his tale simply survives. 

 

*The director himself supports this argument. In an interview in The New York Times with Thomas Rogers on January 27, 2023, Dhont observed that growing up the small town of Dikkelvenne near Ghent, that he too “often felt like an outsider.”

      “Other boys saw him as too feminine and mocked his interest in dance, except one named Félicien, with whom he shared a close friendship. But as the two approached puberty, Dhont felt social pressures pulling them apart.” Rogers continues, “’In that moment, that tenderness started to become looked at through the lens of sexuality,’ Dhont, now 31, said in a recent interview. ‘People were divided into groups and boxes, and we were confronted with the idea of labels.’ As they became fearful of being ostracized, their friendship evaporated, and Dhont, who is gay, was fiercely bullied for the rest of his school days.” Dhont admits that Close was, in part, influenced by those events, thus suggesting that being gay, without even knowing it, is an aspect of the relationship between his fictional Léo and Rémi.

 

Los Angeles, February 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).