Close: this portrait of a messy friendship is too neat for its own good

It’s always sad to see childhood’s blissful disdain for boundaries eventually surrender to the categories of the adult world, but Lukas Dhont’s Close pushes this melancholy idea into the realm of genuine tragedy. Riding a wave of acclaim all the way to an Oscar nomination since its premiere at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the young Belgian director’s second feature tells the story of a friendship between two boys on the cusp of puberty – a friendship that rapidly morphs from ambrosial to anguished. Yet if the emotion generated by their bond is undeniable, the film’s overall impact is often dulled by Dhont’s desire to keep things overly neat, in terms of narrative, imagery and concepts of masculinity. Isn’t adolescence ultimately about realising that life is a mess?

Early in the film, as Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) run through fields of brightly coloured chrysanthemums in the late summer sun, no one else seems to matter. The two 13-year-olds play together, share a bed, confide in, comfort and show affection for one other, each the other’s world entire, no descriptions or labels needed. Perhaps that’s why the comments they receive on the first day of secondary school cut so deep, as Léo is forced to field questions from their classmates about the precise nature of their ‘relationship’, which he is quick to place unambiguously in the domain of friendship. Rémi continues as always, but Léo immediately starts creating what now feels to him like a more appropriate distance between them, stopping any sort of idle touching, moving to sleep on the mattress on the floor alone, dismissing their former games and taking up ice hockey as a means of finding a new circle. Rémi is first bemused, then hurt and finally angry; what happens next will tear the friendship asunder for good and divide the film into a clear before and after.

Watching the rapid disintegration of Léo and Rémi’s bond and its aftermath is never less than touching, not least due to the unwavering intensity of the central duo’s performances, although the speed with which it crumbles frequently rests on devices and ideas more aimed at pushing the seemingly pre-determined narrative ever onwards than digging deeper into the themes at hand. Dhont largely narrates the friendship by breaking it down into discrete everyday situations and repeatedly checking in on these as a way of tracing the decline. Thus we first see Léo and Rémi riding their bikes to school side by side, then later one behind the other, before Léo finally decides not to wait for Rémi and cycles alone. But for all the clarity it conveys, this device doesn’t leave a lot of space for much that doesn’t fit into the established trajectory, particularly when repeated across multiple situations; we see little of the sort of oblique, less obvious moments that define a relationship just as much as more habitual interactions.

Dhont’s predilection for convenient shorthand also extends to the conception of Léo and Rémi’s characters, whereby Léo is more outgoing, proactive, upbeat and sporty, and Rémi is more retiring, cautious, nervous and artistic. Although some of these attributes emerge in reaction to – or are to some extent imposed by – the new ‘rules’ of the school setting, they still veer perhaps too closely to neat, well-worn binaries of ‘traditional’ versus ‘non-traditional’ masculinity or even straight versus gay. The prevailing opinions on such matters are conveyed only by the aforementioned conversation between Léo and his new classmates, which must also serve as the linchpin for the entire narrative to boot. Not that appearing ‘different’ is ever easy at school, but a greater diversity of positions among the schoolmates might have been more in line with the times.

Perhaps this sense of convenient neatness wouldn’t be so apparent if the film had been structured differently. The clipped, rapidly paced ‘before’ eventually gives way to a lengthier, more sedate ‘after’, which allows us to scrutinise the narrative and thematic building blocks used for the entire narrative’s construction more closely in retrospect. But even with the space to explore and go deeper in this second section, Dhont still tends to default to the more obvious, as exemplified by a recurring chrysanthemum motif: first cut-off flower heads in the mud, then new plants being gently reared, and finally the same blooming fields of the beginning. Perhaps life isn’t such a mess if teenage trauma appears to melt away with the seasons?

► Close is in UK cinemas now, and will be available to stream on MUBI from 21 April.