‘Close’ struggles to capture the sense of intimacy it promises

A24

Eden Dambrine, Émilie Dequenne, and Gustav De Waele in Close.

Delicacy and beauty aren’t by themselves sufficient in a work that calls for more emotional sensitivity or insight, though they certainly don’t hurt. In the case of Lukas Dhont’s Close, a film whose capable (if opaque) leading performances buoy it partway emotionally alongside its formal strengths, the film lacks sorely the sense of intimacy promised by its title. Working to render a period of growing self-awareness experienced by two Belgian, queer, 13-year old boys, Dhont struggles when working both metaphorically and literally to capture the sense of specificity or emotional weight the story rightly deserves.

This pervasive shortcoming proves quite a shame, given the present sense of heft Close’s subject merits in our own political moment. Youthful experiences of attraction and dawning sexual awareness are fraught to treat due to the potential for prurience involved, but the freedom for people as much as stories to explore them currently finds itself — especially in the United States — under renewed and heavy attack. For this reason, Close’s premise — of observing the tight bond between two kids who might, in some fumbling and indefinite way, consider themselves more than friends once they find the words to — offers much of value: especially for considering queer attraction and identity as a perspective experienced by many early, before a point of easy or unhindered articulation. Spotlighting a moment just as vivid but perhaps tougher to reckon with than the ways of living which might arrive for his two leads later, Dhont has plainly landed on a worthwhile subject.

In certain moments, Léo and Rémi’s experiences scan as realistic, even prototypical; in others, they’re idealized and so heavily polished that any veneer of credibility wears thin. With a largely binarized structure that moves between spaces, the film first presents the domestic and pastoral settings in which the boys, who seem to be biking-distance neighbors and longtime friends, play-act, sprint endlessly through the ever-flowering fields of a nearby farm, and sleep over at one another’s homes. With Rémi’s mother (a versatile but underserved Émilie Dequenne) declaring Léo (played by Eden Dambrine) early on a “son of the heart” as they lay about in the grass outside, the connection between the three of them is made to seem as solid as most firm familial ones. While these homey, sun-soaked scenes allude only sparsely at first to any potential for imminent or external tension or threat, their emotional cast eventually dims as elements from the movie’s other key spheres pollute a once spotless reality.

That other space is a more grown-up one: the realm of school and sport, and their attendant litany of social compromises. While at 13 the boys can’t be new to coursework, or to offering an unguarded public showcase of their friendship, the two find in the fall that follows the film’s opening idylls that some threshold of age and prejudice appears to have been unwittingly crossed in terms of what’s now thought acceptable. “Are you together?” one schoolmate asks in the semester’s first days — just a scene before another presses the pair on their relationship significantly harder. Drawing Léo into hockey as, more than a hobby, a kind of smokescreen providing a useful masculine affect (Dhont and cinematographer Frank van den Eeden often shoot Dambrine’s character as all but buried awkwardly in the game’s uncommunicative, armor-like uniform), these social pressures gradually pull the film’s central pair apart, paining Rémi most acutely.

The separation between the film’s two worlds thus becomes chronological and not just geographic, a contestable boundary between more mature (constricted) and youthful (carefree) parts of life. Dhont makes blunt metaphors of Léo’s work to negotiate his growing grasp of this, with the flower farms he plays around in providing more plain expressions of flourishing, wilting, fading, and regrowth than Dambrine’s performance really can. A blond, delicate kid whose impassive face is beset with gigantic, platter-like eyes, Dambrine manages to make Léo arresting even when he does little more than stare, inviting viewers to project volumes of emotion onto his often tremulous but less than giving palette of expressions.

While this dynamic largely works in real-time given moments, there’s much anyway it doesn’t offer for the film taken as a whole. While Dambrine’s performance is not quite “off” taken on its own terms, the movie fails for embracing this acting register as sufficient in providing us with real particulars — and thus fails to fill out the particulars of each boy’s presumably specific interior and emotional lives. With the viewer’s experience of the pair’s feelings careening between hard-pressed metaphors of pain and healing, wounds and growth, and then invitations to barely-informed psychological speculation, Close never really finds a register that grounds the film. Instead, it always seems to approach its subjects from some distant place outside. Rarely moving past what one might presume or expect based on sociological and situational context, the characters in Close aren’t elaborated enough to give them a sense of narrative independence from a sense of them as “written,” curbing their ability to feel as live as they really might — or any capacity to behave on their own terms, much less surprise.

Instead of building toward something that might enable this sort of observational and experiential detail, Dhont structures his film (written collaboratively with Angelo Tijssens) around a few key metaphors and the back-and-forth experience of quotidian routine, which persists coolly even through the film’s main points of rupture. While this experience, of a dully rhythmic day-to-day, plays like roles for both working adults and school-age children, it’s hard to feel that much is changing or put on offer as we return endlessly to certain settings. One can only watch Léo elbow his way around a hockey rink or see the boys tussle in bed or sprint through blooming fields so many times before such scenes lose any once-held luster. Instead of providing a sense of digging deeper over time, these scenes feel like repetitions of one another — made distinct only through the most obvious of narrative and formal gestures. They lack, too (and oddly enough) a sense of sensory vividity and tactile sensuality — such as one might find from something as simple as shooting a hand brushing over wood or grass, easy stuff to nail in a pastoral setting.

Rather than treat each moment of re-visitation as a chance to find something new in a familiar space, Dhont banks on meaning and depth arising from his cast’s performances and the hard-pressed metaphors which structure and surround them. While the film’s two-world structure offers some fruitful, communicative strains of cross-pollination (between the scholastic and domestic, the structured adult world and the shaggier one of youth), one senses in watching that Dhont doesn’t exactly grasp its variety of potential resonances and strengths. Treating the film’s spheres as refuges to cut between at the close of each scene instead of environments inviting purposeful, narrative forms of investigation, Dhont’s structural assemblage banks on work that’s reliably either overly prescriptive or insufficiently defined. Unable to play to its own strengths, Close’s script is left to bounce and flounder. Like its characters, it deserves better than what it gets, seeming always on the run.