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2022 · Lukas Dhont
Two 13-year-old boys spend an idyllic summer together, but their connection is put to the test when they become the subject of speculation at school.
dir. Lukas Dhont · 2022
Lukas Dhont's second feature won the Grand Prix at Cannes and an Oscar nomination, confirming the young Belgian as the poet laureate of adolescent interiority. Two thirteen-year-old boys share a friendship of total, unselfconscious physical ease — sleeping head to head, racing through flower fields — until a classmate's idle question introduces the idea that such closeness requires a name. What follows is a study of how boys learn to withdraw from tenderness, and what that schooling costs. Dhont found his lead, Eden Dambrine, on a train, and draws from him a performance of extraordinary restraint: the film's grief lives in posture, in a jaw held tight, in what a child decides not to say. Frank van den Eeden's camera stays at the boys' height amid the industrial flower farm's ranks of dahlias, harvested by season — a structure that lets color itself mark the passage from summer abundance to winter clarity. Belgian cinema gave us the Dardennes' moral rigor; Dhont offers something adjacent but lusher, sorrow rendered in full bloom.
Lines of influence
- Rosetta (1999) — Establishes the handheld camera locked to a young protagonist's shoulders and back so we read emotion through gait and haste rather than dialogue — the exact bodily grammar Dhont uses to chase Léo through the farm.
- The Son (Le Fils) (2002) — Films grief and guilt from the nape of the neck, withholding the face and refusing musical cues, teaching Dhont's method of letting a boy's averted body carry unspeakable loss.
- The Kid with a Bike (2011) — Centers a restive pre-adolescent boy in a redemptive-grief arc and uses the bicycle as kinetic motif, a direct template for Léo's cycling through seasons.
- Girl (2018) — Dhont's own debut sets his signature: a non-professional young lead, near-clinical restraint, and the camera pressed against an adolescent body negotiating identity through physical discipline.
- Tomboy (2011) — Pioneers the child-height, patient observational camera that treats a kid's gender and friendships with adult gravity and no explanatory voiceover — Dhont inherits the eye level.
- Water Lilies (2007) — Builds adolescent intimacy through glances, proximity, and withheld gesture rather than plot, modeling the charged wordless closeness of Léo and Rémi's early scenes.
- The 400 Blows (1959) — Founds the coming-of-age realism of following one boy's face and flight through institutions, the tracking-with-the-child logic Dhont's Dardenne-descended camera extends.
- Days of Heaven (1978) — Turns agrarian labor and magic-hour fields into an emotional register keyed to seasonal cycle, the lyrical-harvest palette Dhont borrows for the flower farm's chromatic structure.
- Brokeback Mountain (2005) — Renders repressed male tenderness and its aftermath of grief through landscape and physical reticence, the masculinity-and-withdrawal grammar Close transposes to boyhood.
- Ratcatcher (1999) — Fuses working-class child realism with poetic, guilt-haunted imagery after a death, showing how a boy's culpability can be staged through mood and object rather than confession.
- Moonlight (2016) — Uses color as chapter-structure and extreme performance restraint to trace tender, imperiled male intimacy across a boy's growth — the closest peer to Close's craft on masculinity and palette.
- Summer 1993 (Estiu 1993) (2017) — Shoots grief entirely from a small child's eye level with a non-professional lead across a single season, sharing Close's child-height camera and seasonal-mourning form.
- Petite Maman (2021) — Distills loss into a hushed, autumnal child's-world miniature with restrained kid performances, extending the same eye-level tenderness-toward-grief Dhont works in.
- God's Own Country (2017) — Locates inarticulate male intimacy in the physical labor of a working farm, sharing Close's staging of emotion through rural work and withheld speech.
- Aftersun (2022) — Reconstructs unbearable loss through elliptical restraint and the ache of what a young person couldn't yet see, a contemporary twin to Close's under-stated grief mechanics.
- The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin) (2022) — Builds an entire emotional arc from a withholding child's silences on a rural farm across a season, the same non-professional-lead restraint and pastoral setting as Close.
- The Eight Mountains (2022) — Traces a lifelong male friendship and its severance across landscape and time with Belgian-directed restraint, echoing Close's study of intimacy between boys and its rupture.
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