A version of this “Close” story first appeared in the International Race issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Belgian director Lukas Dhont’s second film, “Close” centers on the friendship between two 13-year-old boys (newcomers Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele) and a breakup that divides them. The moving and delicate drama brought audiences to tears during its premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Dhont received the Jury Prize. (Four years ago, his first film, “Girl,” won the festival’s Camera d’Or for best first feature.)
Now the film has been selected as Belgium’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film category at this year’s Oscars. Belgium has been nominated seven times but is yet to win, a statistic that could very well change with “Close” at next March’s awards. Some pundits have even speculated whether Dhont could be on the list of best directors, joining six non-English-speaking filmmakers (Alfonso Cuarón, Pawel Pawlikowski, Bong Joon-ho, Lee Isaac Chung, Thomas Vinterberg, Ryusuke Hamaguchi) who have been nominated in the category of best director. last four years.
On the eve of the film’s theatrical release (A24 is the US distributor), Dhont, 31, spoke to TheWrap about his inspirations for the film. And how those mythical stories about how actors are discovered, for example, randomly on a passenger train, are sometimes true.
The film follows two best friends on the brink of adolescence. What inspired the story?
There’s a book that really nurtured the writing of the movie called “Deep Secrets” of an American professor named Niobe Way. She spent five years studying the lives of American children and discovered that when the boys were 13 years old, they spoke of their male friends with these tender testimonials of love. There was no stigma around her. Then at 15 and 18 she asks them the same questions again and she feels a general wave of them not wanting to talk with the same intimacy and emotion. They have distanced themselves from that vulnerable and tender language.
How did you personally react to reading that?
I was broken. I didn’t grow up in the United States, I’m from the Flemish camp and I also grew up queer, but I felt like I went through a very similar experience. At a certain point in my puberty I distanced myself not only from young people but from all the people around me, because I also felt those pressures of masculinity. In many ways, it has nothing to do with sexuality. It’s how we perceive these expressions of cuteness and how we immediately want to categorize them.
Does the teacher who wrote the book know about your movie?
She knows about the movie. A friend of hers had told her that I talked about her work, so she contacted me on Instagram. Now we text her every day and she is delighted with it. Let’s hang out when she comes to New York. There is a crisis of masculinity and she shows us where it starts, and her research has been instrumental for me in understanding the nuances.
And did it help you feel the potential of a film on that topic?
Yes, I understood that I wanted to make a film about a strong connection between young men where we allowed the space to be tender, intimate and even sensual, which you don’t always get to see. Then show what the loss of tenderness and loss of connection means to us as human beings.
In the movie, these two boys notice that their friendship is categorized as romantic by other classmates, simply because they are close.
Exactly. I wanted to make a film about a strong connection between young men, where we allow the space to be tender, intimate and even sensual, which you don’t always get to see. Then show what the loss of connection means to us as human beings. And as I figured out the whole story arc, I thought a lot about these two words, fragility and brutality, as the themes that I wanted to explore.
How did you discover the young actor Eden Dambrine, so natural and moving in the main role of Léo?
On a train, actually. It’s the kind of story that when I read it, I don’t believe it. I was sitting on a train from Antwerp to Ganz and listening music max richter. Everything becomes a movie when you’re listening to Max Richter. I looked next to me and there was a boy talking to his friends and I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he was very expressive with his big eyes and he was clearly making a point. And I felt like, “This is one of those moments. If you don’t say anything now, you will regret it.
What did you say to him?
I asked him if he was interested in acting. She clearly expressed her interest in him. His friends were also through the roof. There was an advantage because I had already made a feature film and his mother could Google me. Ultimately, we saw hundreds of kids, but Eden and (co-star) Gustav (De Waele) gravitated towards each other and helped each other out. It felt like a chance for collaboration and friendship, which was so important for the film to be successful. And they were so excited to be in a movie. They were in it to win it.
Léo’s family lives and works on a flower farm, and various scenes take place between the fields. What was the meaning of that scenario for you?
When I was very early thinking about the story, one of the first things that appeared on my moodboard was an image of two children running through flowers. I grew up in the countryside and there was a lot of nature. That was a key memory that I kept from childhood. And the flower is also a symbol of fragility. In terms of structure and plot points, he realized that the film needs to start with fragility and tenderness and then move to a point where those things break down in society.
About halfway through the movie, there is a plot point that changes the direction of the story.
Well, when that plot point comes around, it’s a way of radically expressing the importance of the boys’ connection. We were all also going through the pandemic and a theme that became more present, dramaturgically, was mourning. We focus a lot on physical health with mental health coming in second. When we do screenings with young people, you can feel that this idea really comes up among them.
The movie begins and ends in the flower fields, although the two scenes are quite different. Without being too specific, can you say what you wanted to achieve with the ending?
Well, we watch the farm over the course of an entire season, with the vivid colors changing to the brutality of the machines in this brown atmosphere. But what I love about the ending is that there is the possibility of returning to that previous fragility, to that tenderness, to that world that we saw at the beginning. On the other hand, he wanted to say that many of us no longer have certain people in our lives, but there is the possibility of carrying them within us. That is a strong and hopeful realization and there is a beauty in that idea that I love.
Read more of the edition of the International Race here
