In Lukas Dhont’s Close, a childhood bond is tested as two boys enter their teenage years — with dramatic consequences. Screen talks to the director about his powerful tale of adolescence, selected as Belgium’s Oscar entry
With his debut feature Girl, Belgian writer/director Lukas Dhont presented a delicate, nuanced portrayal of a teenage transgender girl and aspiring ballerina — in the process scooping the Camera d’Or for first feature at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
Girl was chosen as Belgium’s submission to the 2019 international feature film Oscar — but failed to secure a nomination, or to make what that year was a 10-strong shortlist for the category. Better things are expected of Dhont’s new film Close — which shared the Cannes grand prix in May, has likewise been submitted as Belgium’s Oscar entry, and once again explores the challenges facing adolescents.
Talking to Screen International during October’s BFI London Film Festival, Dhont describes Girl as being “about femininity but also the relationship with the body”, while Close is about “childhood and masculinity, friendship and behaviour”.
Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) are 13-year-old best friends who spend all of their time together. However, at their new school, Léo is being drawn into a different crowd and made to feel embarrassed about his intimacy with Rémi. He distances himself from his friend, with dramatic consequences.
One of the starting points for Close came when Dhont read research from a US psychologist about teenage boys, and recognised himself in the descriptions. “At that age, 13 or 14, I started to copy the other young men around me because I wanted to belong to that group,” he says. “In order to belong, I pushed away certain boys that wanted to come close or stay close. I became a bit more distant, a bit more of a performer. That is something I regret, very much so, taking that distance and not allowing that tenderness to be whatever it might be.”
In his youth, Dhont aspired to be a dancer, and was very expressive with his body — “but I also understood that people felt I moved quite femininely and that it embarrassed them.” Like Léo in Close, he started to copy the behaviour of other young men who fitted in better than he did.
While telling a story about a faltering friendship between two young Belgians, the director views the subject matter as universal. “Men, women, whatever gender, whatever identity, I think we have all been in that place where, all of a sudden, we are heartbroken by a friendship that changes, that is no longer the same anymore,” he says. “Heartbreak is so often expressed around the romantic relationship — which in our society, takes all of the space — but so often we feel heartbreak in relationship to friendship.”
Producing partners
Close is produced by Dirk Impens of Menuet working alongside the director’s brother, Michiel Dhont. “Dirk and I go way back,” Dhont says of the Flemish film industry veteran whom he regards as “an artistic collaborator” as well as a producer. With screen credits dating back to 1989, Impens’ productions include Dhont’s Girl and Felix van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown — which was the last Belgian title to secure an Oscar nomination for best international feature (or rather best foreign-language film, as the category was then called) in 2014. “I really appreciate his opinion,” adds Dhont. “He will just rip the Band-Aid off. If he doesn’t like something, he will tell you directly.”
Impens had been planning to retire but decided to “continue a little longer” to help Dhont “on that journey of a second film. I think he [Impens] realised a second film can be quite challenging. I think he wanted to stay to guide us.” By contrast to Impens, Michiel was a novice who had only recently left film school. Impens took the younger producer under his wing, says the director.
The film’s co-producing partners included France’s Diaphana Films, the Netherlands’ Topkapi Films and Belgium’s Versus Production, with The Match Factory handling sales. Early November saw Lumiere release in Benelux and Diaphana in France — recording more than 300,000 admissions in France and Belgium at press time. In the US, the backing of distributor A24 should prove helpful in connecting Close with awards voters, while in the UK, a timely release by Mubi will qualify it for the Baftas.
Fast friends
Close benefits from exceptional performances by its two young leads. In particular, Dambrine impresses as Léo, the teenager devastated by the consequences of his betrayal of an old friend.
“The story of finding him [Dambrine] is a bit peculiar,” says Dhont. “I was sitting on a train and I was listening to music. I looked next to me and I see Eden talking to his friends. Immediately, I was struck by his expression, a face that is expressing so many things. He was incredibly magnetic. Also, he had this angelic, androgynous quality that I was looking for in this character. But mostly it was his expressiveness.”
When Eden came to a full-day audition, he was put in a group with De Waele. “They immediately gravitated toward each other. We saw not only their talent but also the possibility of collaboration.”
Both boys were evidently sensitive and intelligent. They also had a youthful innocence that appealed to the director. “They were connected to their emotional cores because they were still kids. I think that from the moment puberty hits, we learn to be actors,” Dhont reflects. “Masculinity? They’re young men growing up and so they understand the pressures of it.” He also felt they had an instinctive grasp of the “fragility” of the friendship that was being portrayed in the film. “Because we talked about all those things and they were able to connect to those elements in their own lives, it [the film] became very personal for them.”
The ambition now is for the Dhont brothers to continue working together. Lukas is already preparing a new film with the working title Love And War — another project with his regular screenwriter collaborator Angelo Tijssens (who co-wrote Girl and Close) as well as with producer Juliette Schrameck (co-producer of The Worst Person In The World). The director is coy about revealing too much but says the new film will be on a bigger scale than its predecessors. “I want to continue showing characters who challenge these boxes, labels and norms in our society linked to identity but in a different setting and at a different time.”
In the third feature, the main characters will be older. “I am leaving for a moment the arena of adolescence,” he explains.
Dhont can move with equal fluency, from talking about his adolescence to holding forth on the recent boom in Belgian cinema of which he is a part. “Maybe our film fund is putting something in the water,” he jokes about how the success of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) helped unearth exceptional new filmmaking talent, whether Fien Troch (best director in Venice’s Horizons in 2016 with Home), Van Groeningen or Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (who broke through in 2015 with Black and have subsequently forged a Hollywood career, including Bad Boys For Life).
“But we have a legacy in this country with people like Chantal Akerman, the brothers Dardenne and Jaco Van Dormael,” Dhont adds. “We have this beautiful legacy that we build on. We all try to make films that feel important to us [and are] from the heart. Also, maybe because we’re a little country, we have this desire to prove ourselves — a little of this Napoleon effect! We just know that if we want to reach an audience, we have to think internationally.”
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