Young Hearts
2024 · Anthony Schatteman
14-year-old Elias increasingly feels like an outsider in his village. When he meets his new neighbour of the same age, Alexander, Elias is confronted with his burgeoning sexuality.
dir. Anthony Schatteman · 2024
Fourteen-year-old Elias has a loving family, a girlfriend by default, and a Flemish village that fits him like someone else's coat; then Alexander moves in next door, and a friendship arrives carrying a charge Elias has no name for yet. Anthony Schatteman's debut feature, premiered in the Berlinale's Generation strand, was inevitably measured against his countryman Lukas Dhont's Close — but where Dhont steers boyhood intimacy toward grief, Schatteman commits to something rarer and, in its way, riskier: a queer coming-of-age story that trusts tenderness to sustain a whole film. The craft is unforced naturalism — summer light, bicycles cresting country roads, a schlager-singing father whose sentimental hits shadow his son's very unsentimental feelings — anchored by Lou Goossens's astonishingly transparent lead performance, a face on which every flicker of panic and hope is legible. Word of mouth carried it far beyond the festival circuit, embraced as the gentle first-love film a generation of viewers wished they'd had at fourteen. Its best moments need no dialogue at all: two boys, one look, held a beat longer than is safe.
Lines of influence
- Close (2022) — The named model: Dhont's method of casting two untrained boys for emotional transparency and directing them into unguarded physical closeness against a flat rural Flemish landscape is exactly the register Schatteman adopts.
- Girl (2018) — Establishes the Dhont grammar Young Hearts inherits — a shallow-focus camera held tight on an adolescent body in natural light, letting the face rather than dialogue carry the interior state.
- Rosetta (1999) — The Belgian handheld, following-camera naturalism and nonprofessional-feel performance that all subsequent Flemish social realism (Dhont included) builds from.
- The 400 Blows (1959) — Founds the whole mode of adolescent naturalism resting on an untrained boy's transparent face and location shooting rather than a scripted arc.
- Water Lilies (2007) — Renders teenage sexual awakening through wordless bodily gesture and observational natural light, refusing adult narration or moralizing — Schatteman's 'wordless-moments' craft.
- Tomboy (2011) — Shows childhood queerness in a warm naturalist key with a handheld camera at child's-eye level and a nonprofessional lead, modeling tenderness-over-tragedy.
- Call Me By Your Name (2017) — Sun-drenched available-light cinematography and a languid summer temporality in which desire is told through glances, proximity and diegetic pop rather than declaration.
- Beautiful Thing (1996) — The template for working-class gay teen first-love that resolves in tenderness, using diegetic pop (Mama Cass) as emotional scaffolding — a direct precedent for the schlager soundtrack device.
- Weekend (2011) — Low-key queer romance built from natural light and improvisational, near-documentary transparency between two leads, prioritizing intimacy over plot.
- God's Own Country (2017) — Rural queer belonging where emotion is carried in wordless physical labor and weather-lit landscape, the feeling withheld from speech and given to the body.
- North Sea Texas (2011) — The specific Flemish precedent — provincial Belgian queer coming-of-age and first love rendered in tender, aestheticized naturalism, the tradition Young Hearts extends.
- Jongens (Boys) (2014) — Low-Countries teen-boy first love told through summer sport and sun, structured explicitly to land on tenderness rather than the bury-your-gays ending.
- The Way He Looks (2014) — Adolescent queer romance staged in a warm, unthreatening world that deliberately refuses the tragedy template — the same 'tenderness-over-tragedy' authorial choice.
- Summer of 85 (2020) — Seaside teenage first infatuation scored to diegetic period pop, using a specific era's music as the affective engine of the romance the way schlager works here.
- Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013) — Handheld naturalist close-ups on a young lead's transparent face through sexual awakening, with available light and sensory realism carrying the emotional charge.
- Lie With Me (2022) — Rural provincial first love shadowed by closeted shame and the pull of belonging to a small hometown, the same countryside-and-secrecy staging as Young Hearts.