Post by Dracula on Oct 30, 2022 15:25:51 GMT -5
Close(10/23/2022)
Lukas Dhont’s debut did not go as planned. The young Belgian filmmaker’s 2018 film Girl, a drama about a transgender teenager, was probably the highest profile film to play in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. There it won the Caméra d'Or and the Queer Palm and perhaps most importantly it was acquired by Netflix for North American distribution, which raised its profile quite a bit. However, there was a substantial backlash to the film once trans critics saw it and were highly critical of its depiction. The choice to cast a cis-gender male actor in the lead was viewed as problematic on its face and the film’s focus on physical transformation and body dysmorphia was viewed as wrongheaded and triggering. It had its defenders but the controversy clouded the film throughout its run. Cannes seems to have stood by Dhont however as his follow-up film, Close, played in the official competition and then even won the Grand Prix (in a tie with Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon). I saw at least one critic’s poll that had this placed as the best film to play at the entire festival and it certainly hasn’t been the subject of controversy like Girl was, so it seems to be a comeback for Dhont.
I, however, am a little less enthusiastic. The film is about a pair of boys, aged about twelve or thirteen, who have been best friends since they were extremely young and are described at one point as being “almost like brothers.” As they begin middle school however, some of their peers find this closeness odd, going so far as to ask if the two of them are gay lovers. The two boys react very differently to this, with one brushing it off, but the other seemingly being a bit more distressed by this and starting to subtly distance himself from his friend. He certainly doesn’t formally abandon him, but he does start to take an interest in sports and starts taking part in activities the other boy isn’t involved in and finding other friends and generally building more of a separate identity. If this and Girl have any major link it’s that both films are basically about the way small micro-aggressions can fester in the mind, especially of adolescents and lead to some fairly extreme reactions. Here it’s basically just some idle and seemingly momentary talk about the possibility of these kids being gay, talk which doesn’t even seem terribly hostile or homophobic, that kind of sets off all the trouble.
That setup is what I most admired in the film and I was pretty intrigued by the first half but things took a turn pretty much right at the midpoint that pushed the second half in a less interesting direction. I won’t say it the movie nosedived at that point by any means but I was kind of hoping for the tensions in the first half to play out in more detail. Instead the film kind of just stops and spends the second half just endlessly watching characters reacting to what happened in the twist, and there’s nothing particularly wrong about its depiction to this reaction exactly except that it’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect. In this section the film also takes “show don’t tell” to a bit of a literal extreme and really just spends a lot of time watching people internalize their reactions while refusing to simply talk about what they’re feeling. Yeah, normally I’d rather not have a movie spoonfeed what’s going through the character’s minds but the way it plays out we pretty much just get the obvious responses rather than the complex one right up until the very ending, which pretty much just reveals something that the audience plainly already knows. The movie might have benefited perhaps from a scene in a psychologist’s office or something where we get to the bottom of what’s going on instead of dancing around it. Having said all that, there is plenty to admire here, particularly the way that Dhont directs these two child actors into some pretty strong performances and also a couple smart visual ideas he has like setting parts of the film at a flower farm. But I think this could have been so much more.
*** out of Five
Lukas Dhont’s debut did not go as planned. The young Belgian filmmaker’s 2018 film Girl, a drama about a transgender teenager, was probably the highest profile film to play in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. There it won the Caméra d'Or and the Queer Palm and perhaps most importantly it was acquired by Netflix for North American distribution, which raised its profile quite a bit. However, there was a substantial backlash to the film once trans critics saw it and were highly critical of its depiction. The choice to cast a cis-gender male actor in the lead was viewed as problematic on its face and the film’s focus on physical transformation and body dysmorphia was viewed as wrongheaded and triggering. It had its defenders but the controversy clouded the film throughout its run. Cannes seems to have stood by Dhont however as his follow-up film, Close, played in the official competition and then even won the Grand Prix (in a tie with Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon). I saw at least one critic’s poll that had this placed as the best film to play at the entire festival and it certainly hasn’t been the subject of controversy like Girl was, so it seems to be a comeback for Dhont.
I, however, am a little less enthusiastic. The film is about a pair of boys, aged about twelve or thirteen, who have been best friends since they were extremely young and are described at one point as being “almost like brothers.” As they begin middle school however, some of their peers find this closeness odd, going so far as to ask if the two of them are gay lovers. The two boys react very differently to this, with one brushing it off, but the other seemingly being a bit more distressed by this and starting to subtly distance himself from his friend. He certainly doesn’t formally abandon him, but he does start to take an interest in sports and starts taking part in activities the other boy isn’t involved in and finding other friends and generally building more of a separate identity. If this and Girl have any major link it’s that both films are basically about the way small micro-aggressions can fester in the mind, especially of adolescents and lead to some fairly extreme reactions. Here it’s basically just some idle and seemingly momentary talk about the possibility of these kids being gay, talk which doesn’t even seem terribly hostile or homophobic, that kind of sets off all the trouble.
That setup is what I most admired in the film and I was pretty intrigued by the first half but things took a turn pretty much right at the midpoint that pushed the second half in a less interesting direction. I won’t say it the movie nosedived at that point by any means but I was kind of hoping for the tensions in the first half to play out in more detail. Instead the film kind of just stops and spends the second half just endlessly watching characters reacting to what happened in the twist, and there’s nothing particularly wrong about its depiction to this reaction exactly except that it’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect. In this section the film also takes “show don’t tell” to a bit of a literal extreme and really just spends a lot of time watching people internalize their reactions while refusing to simply talk about what they’re feeling. Yeah, normally I’d rather not have a movie spoonfeed what’s going through the character’s minds but the way it plays out we pretty much just get the obvious responses rather than the complex one right up until the very ending, which pretty much just reveals something that the audience plainly already knows. The movie might have benefited perhaps from a scene in a psychologist’s office or something where we get to the bottom of what’s going on instead of dancing around it. Having said all that, there is plenty to admire here, particularly the way that Dhont directs these two child actors into some pretty strong performances and also a couple smart visual ideas he has like setting parts of the film at a flower farm. But I think this could have been so much more.
*** out of Five
