In praise of Close’s depic­tion of youth

Cast­ing an eye back over the long and sto­ried his­to­ry of cin­e­ma, it seems as if it’s only rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly that we’ve start­ed to take kids seri­ous­ly on screen. A film such as Lukas Dhont’s Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed Close, about the inti­ma­cies and rit­u­als that devel­op in the rela­tion­ship between two pre-teen boys in a Bel­gian farm­ing com­mu­ni­ty, feels like a world away from the stereo­typ­i­cal depic­tions of chil­dren in Hol­ly­wood films of the late 20^th cen­tu­ry, where con­trived pre­coc­i­ty has always been the order of the day.

In Close, the two boys at the cen­tre of the dra­ma, played by Eden Dambrine and Gus­tav de Waele, are writ­ten as being emo­tion­al­ly mature rather than hav­ing dis­cern­able adult feel­ings and words placed in their heads/​mouths. In the film they play 13-year-olds Léo and Rémi (respec­tive­ly), best friends whose bond verges on the broth­er­ly. How­ev­er as they start a new school year, the change­able tides of ado­les­cence place pres­sure on a rela­tion­ship of sin­gu­lar close­ness. There are hints, too, that the pair are expe­ri­enc­ing the ini­tial pangs of impuls­es that they may not yet have the psy­cho­log­i­cal appa­ra­tus to dis­cern or decipher.

The film also sug­gests that, some­times, when we feel things we don’t under­stand, our bod­ies and minds can switch into pan­ic mode. Close is a film which search­es for an objec­tive, albeit fleet­ing authen­tic­i­ty rather than using its pro­tag­o­nists as cyphers for the mak­ers’ own nos­tal­gia (although, per­son­al expe­ri­ence no doubt plays a part in the telling of the tale). Dhont has form in this domain, as Close is a fol­low-up to his dra­ma Girl, about a trans teenage bal­let dancer’s fraught and some­times shock­ing jour­ney towards gen­der affirmation.

One of the great films about child­hood which cuts a fine bal­ance between the roman­tic and the trag­ic is Mau­rice Pialat’s L’Enfance Nue (Naked Child­hood) from 1968, which forges a ten­der char­ac­ter study around a behav­ioral­ly-chal­lenged orphan who is being passed through the bru­tal French fos­ter care sys­tem. The lyri­cism and thirst for gen­uine under­stand­ing dis­played by its mak­er makes this a rev­o­lu­tion­ary film in its own mod­est way and, like Close, it is an attempt to look at a child while kneel­ing down to meet their own eye-line. Pialat was fas­ci­nat­ed by the idea of empow­er­ing youth on screen, and did so in films such as Grad­u­ate First (1978) and A Nos Amours (1983).

Though there are notable great child­hood films from around the globe (Yazu­jiro Ozu’s Good Morn­ing from Japan, Andrei Tarkvosky’s Ivan’s Child­hood from Rus­sia, Vic­tor Erice’s The Spir­it of the Bee­hive from Spain), it seems that France remains at the van­guard of cre­at­ing chal­leng­ing and empa­thet­ic por­traits of con­fused and bemused youth. Indeed, Celine Sci­amma has made it the basis of her career, explor­ing pre-teen les­bian desire in her aquat­ic won­der from 2007, Water Lilies, and explor­ing sim­i­lar themes again in young women with her Sight and Sound poll-plun­der­ing Por­trait of a Woman on Fire from 2019.

Per­haps the film which oper­ates best as a handy fore­run­ner to Close is Sciamma’s gor­geous 2011 film Tomboy, about a gen­der non-con­form­ing 10-year-old (Zoé Héran) and how their casu­al defi­ance of per­ceived social norms plays out among a group of large­ly untrou­bled peers. It also explores the rela­tion­ship that blos­soms between Héran’s Lau­re (who iden­ti­fies as Mick­aël to friends) and Jeanne Disson’s Lisa, offer­ing a cel­e­bra­tion of hon­est desire which bold­ly inti­mates that love and friend­ship come from a place of pri­mal prove­nance that doesn’t ascribe to rigid­ly imposed or archa­ic ways of think­ing about sex and gender.

Though the lin­eage of Hol­ly­wood cin­e­ma has giv­en us the crass com­ic arche­type of the child com­ic relief, it has through sheer vol­ume of prod­uct also used kids as an out­let for moral pan­ic (Lar­ry Clark’s Kids, or Cather­ine Hardwicke’s Thir­teen) and as a locus for nos­tal­gic won­der­ment and adven­ture (Stephen Spielberg’s ET, Richard Donner’s The Goonies).

How­ev­er, two more recent titles have gone about chal­leng­ing these main­stream stan­dards of kids being used as a way to talk about adult con­cerns, and they are Bar­ry Jenk­ins’ Moon­light (2016) and Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats (2017). Both of these films adopt a more Euro­pean sen­si­bil­i­ty in ask­ing thought­ful ques­tions about the some­times banal, some­times tran­scen­dent tri­als of grow­ing up out­side of a con­ven­tion­al mid­dle class fam­i­ly unit. The for­mer sub­tly frames the evo­lu­tion of gay con­scious­ness against hard­scrab­ble Black lives in a Mia­mi sub­urb over­run with drugs and unchan­neled machis­mo. The lat­ter, mean­while, offers a non-judge­men­tal depic­tion of a sex­u­al­ly-flu­id Brook­lyn-based lon­er and the con­fort he feels in using his body as a commodity.

Close draws on the work start­ed by Hittman, Jenk­ins and Sci­amma while also offer­ing some­thing new into the mix, name­ly its attempts to com­pre­hend just how a per­son of lim­it­ed emo­tion­al capa­bil­i­ties might react to an event they might strug­gle to com­pre­hend as being even pos­si­ble. It’s a film which stands back and comes for­ward at the right moments, giv­ing its pro­tag­o­nists space to explore the extent of the pain and joy they expe­ri­ence from one moment to the next.

CLOSE is in UK and Irish cin­e­mas now, and stream­ing on MUBI from April 21. Find your near­est screen­ing here: mubi​.com/​close

Don’t for­get you can watch CLOSE with 2 months of MUBI GO for just £20. That’s eight trips to the cin­e­ma, plus stream­ing any­time. Offer ends March 10: mubi​.com/​p​r​o​m​o​s​/​g​o​2​0_lwl