Close Review: Lukas Dhont’s Devastating Depiction of the Queerness of Childhood

Lukas Dhont’s Close isn’t so much a film about queer children as it is about the queerness of childhood. Which is to say, the erotic ambivalences and unmanageable feelings that structure children’s lives and which adults work so hard to punish or ignore. This queerness, the very stuff out of which moral panics arise, is rarely captured in cinema, let alone with Dhont’s commitment to both dramatic orthodoxy and sincere pathos. Throughout, the filmmaker never portrays children as innocent angels, but as complex, cruel, and erotic beings.

This doesn’t mean that 13-year-old best friends Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) are necessarily sexually attracted to one another. They are, though, driven to and against each other’s bodies with a force that far exceeds their capacity for comprehension. They thrive off of each other’s touch, and wallow in anxiety when faced with the other’s absence, at times seeking replacement in the bodies of other boys—another classmate, a brother—in vain.

It also means that Léo and Rémi respond to how they feel about each other mostly with their very bodies—by not being able to sleep, eat, or, at one point, hold one’s bladder. Or by sliding one’s head onto the other’s stomach, and pushing the other away because the closeness is overwhelming. For them, in spite of the ease with which they switch between languages, there are no resources beyond their exuberant corporeality to withstand so much affection.

That may sound a bit plot-less for a film that organizes its drama with the storytelling efficiency of an impeccable short story. It’s just that spoilers should be avoided, for a crucial reward of engaging with Close is clinging on to the hope that the irreversible can be avoided. Though much of the experience of watching it is consumed by the dread of tragedy, what’s most remarkable about the film isn’t the impressive competence of its form. Instead, it’s the way in which it immerses us in an excess of emotion not unlike the ones that suffocate Léo and Rémi.

Throughout Close, Dhont depicts the Belgian countryside as a sanctuary of good intentions—societal, institutional, parental—traversed by contradictions and tarnished by the violence of emotions. Belgium appears as a sort of tentative paradise where children enjoy material comfort, autonomy, freedom, and openness, none of which matters because when love—or something like it—grabs hold of a body, everything crumbles.

Léo and Rémi’s attachment is encouraged by their parents, and mostly tolerated by their peers. Rémi is undaunted by the instances when other children question his closeness to Léo, such as the way he’s unafraid to touch Léo’s body in the school yard. But Léo is quick to deny to inquisitive peers that he could be anything more than just Rémi’s good friend, becoming increasingly aware that there’s a price to pay for Rémi’s affection. The price is alienation from the rest of the group, as well as the risk of abandonment if one doesn’t flee first.

Léo, played with uncanny delicateness by the androgynous Dambrine, decides to join the school’s hockey team perhaps as a way to defend himself against the unbearable feelings that Rémi triggers in him. Shielded by hockey’s exoskeleton of a uniform, Léo slips away from Rémi in what could only be described as a transvestism—a self-protective move literally on thin ice, where Léo disavows his desire behind his helmet’s bars, his shin guards, his pads, and his hockey stick, leaving Rémi to his own devices. When they get into a physical brawl at school and Rémi demands what Léo isn’t willing to give, the teacher who breaks up the fight words things with disarmingly metaphorical precision: “It’s over, Rémi. It’s over.”

Close offers a window into the wonders, the limits, and the resilience of a Nordic approach to life, and child-rearing in particular, which is much more rooted in trusting children than “protecting” them. In that sense, the film recalls Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s tour de force of a novel The Discomfort of Evening, where a young child deals with the horrors and pleasures of existence, nourishing an overwhelming closeness to the earth and to parents who are at once always and never there. Close reminds us that a pedagogy centered around a child’s freedom is possible—that for a parent’s love to really be unconditional, as we like to think it is, it’s the parent that should listen to, and learn from, the child. But, also, that any coming of age is a risky business where finitude and mourning are the only guarantees.