Enzo – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Enzo – first-look review

14 May 2025

Words by David Jenkins

A young man with a troubled expression on his face, holding a mobile phone to his ear.
A young man with a troubled expression on his face, holding a mobile phone to his ear.
Robin Campil­lo com­plet­ed this final fea­ture by Lau­rent Can­tet, a beau­ti­ful, bit­ter­sweet study of a teenage boy find­ing his way in life.

The trag­ic con­text behind this film is com­pound­ed fur­ther by the fact that it is tru­ly won­der­ful. Vet­er­an French direc­tor and one-time Palme d’Or-winner Lau­rent Can­tet passed away dur­ing pro­duc­tion, and the reins were tak­en over by his friend and col­league Robin Campillo.

Just spec­u­lat­ing here, but had Can­tet lived to com­plete the film, and deliv­ered some­thing vague­ly sim­i­lar to what we have here, then it would have stood as one of his finest cin­e­mat­ic achieve­ments, par­tic­u­lar­ly when it comes to his over­ar­ch­ing project of explor­ing the lives of young peo­ple in that lim­i­nal space between edu­ca­tion and work. In its crisp, clean clar­i­ty and sub­tle han­dling of com­plex emo­tions and rela­tion­ships, Campil­lo has tak­en the baton and made the film that Can­tet would’ve wanted.

For most of Enzo, its title char­ac­ter (played with almost Bres­son­ian opaque­ness by Eloy Pohu) remains some­thing of an enig­ma. His well-to-do par­ents (Pier­francesco Favi­no and Élodie Bouchez) are set up in a lux­u­ry vil­la with a money-can’t‑buy ocean view, and Enzo should be fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of his old­er broth­er Vic­tor to uni­ver­si­ty and beyond. Except for rea­sons that no-one can fath­om, Enzo wants noth­ing more than to be an hon­est-to-good­ness brick­ie, hang out on work sites and get­ting giant blis­ters on his hands from the phys­i­cal graft.

Ini­tial­ly, the film teas­es itself as some­thing of a class satire, ask­ing whether it’s pos­si­ble for an enti­tled, mid­dle-class lad to relin­quish his eco­nom­ic and social sta­tus and adopt an authen­ti­cal­ly work­ing class exis­tence. His father is mor­ti­fied, and Favi­no has a cou­ple of superb scenes in which he reflects on his own defi­cien­cies as a father when it comes to Enzo’s intractable stance. The film threat­ens at points to skew towards pre­dom­i­nant­ly male con­cerns and the bond between father and son, yet it’s Bouchez as the moth­er who is able to soft­ly draw out Enzo’s neu­ro­sis with her more mater­nal approach.

What’s more galling to the par­ents is that Enzo doesn’t seem to be much good as a builder, fum­bling sim­ple tasks and humil­i­at­ing the boss in front of clients. He is, how­ev­er, a great artist with mas­sive poten­tial, but has no inter­est in pur­su­ing that tal­ent fur­ther. So the ques­tion of why Enzo wants this life for him­self tan­ta­lis­ing­ly hangs over much of the film’s first half, and is ten­der­ly revealed in its second.

It would spoil the film to say what exact­ly is fuelling Enzo’s stol­id deter­mi­na­tion, yet the sto­ry shifts into a high­er, more heart­break­ing gear as it goes on to explore emo­tions of the more roman­tic hue. In the end, Enzo sub­tly reframes itself as a love sto­ry, though one that is inter­est­ed in look­ing at how erot­ic attrac­tion can exert an intox­i­cat­ing influ­ence on our prac­ti­cal life choic­es. Enzo’s antag­o­nis­tic demeanour, it tran­spires, is born from a place of inno­cence and lack of experience.

The film is shot in a way which doesn’t objec­ti­fy the char­ac­ters or their class, and there’s no musi­cal score used to undu­ly guide our emo­tions. As things draw to a close and Enzo starts to make more deci­sions with his heart than with his head, the film doesn’t exploit tragedy, but instead takes the char­ac­ters’ wind­ing and sur­pris­ing paths in its gen­tle, supreme­ly affect­ing stride. And the final scene absolute­ly wrecked me.

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