Winter Boy Review: A Provocative Portrait of Self-Discovery Born of Grief

AIDS is ever present in Christophe Honoré’s 2018 film Sorry Angel. But rather than dictate the choices and emotions of the characters, the disease simply colors their experiences, serving as a filter through which they see the world. In Winter Boy, Honoré approaches grief in a similarly subtle, intriguingly indirect manner. Where many films show grief merely as a crippling hindrance, Winter Boy sees it as an emotional state that constantly rises and recedes, disrupting the flow and morphing the meaning of everyday experience.

Honoré himself plays a soon-to-be-deceased father, Claude, immediately alluding to the personal nature of the film, which is based on his experiences after losing his own father. Winter Boy’s main focus, though, is Claude’s 17-year-old son, Lucas (Paul Kircher), who’s the same age that Honoré was when his father died, and who faces the aftermath of this loss with his mother, Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), and older brother, Quentin (Vincent Lacoste).

Through intermittent voiceover and direct-to-camera confessionals, Lucas serves as the film’s unreliable narrator, giving voice to his turmoil in ways that sometimes feel at odds with his actual behavior. Where Isabelle and Quentin are more honest in grappling with their emotional trauma, Lucas not only hides his pain behind a smiley mask, but also uses his loss as a catalyst to further explore his burgeoning queer sexuality in both productive and destructive ways.

That’s certainly a sign of Lucas’s immaturity, but Kircher, in a remarkably restrained yet captivating debut performance, imbues Lucas with a precociousness and mischievousness that makes it challenging to easily discern exactly how he’s handling his father’s untimely death or what exactly drives his increasingly curious behavior. For some, Honoré’s more oblique grappling with grief may prove frustrating, but Winter Boy also features an intriguing familial dynamic that helps to occasionally shed light on the pain that Lucas is experiencing.

Binoche and Honoré regular Lacoste are superb in their small roles, and through their respective characters’ attempts to both guide and restrain Lucas, his deeply held love and resentments of his father become more apparent. In a beautiful early scene, we witness the trio listening to a family favorite, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Electricity,” as emotions surge and tears turn to laughter, sparking an endearingly awkward, tender dance party.

For as involved as Isabelle and Quentin are in Lucas’s life in the wake of Claude’s death, it’s actually Quentin’s gay roommate, Lilio (Erwan Kepoa Falé), whom Lucas connects deepest with throughout Winter Boy. Lucas meets Lilio when he travels to Paris to stay with his brother for a week and finds in the much older Lilio both something of a father figure and a potential lover. This attraction only heightens Lucas’s confusion during this tumultuous time, and as Lucas tries to lure Lilio closer to him, even replicating the older man’s behavior in self-destructive ways, it becomes apparent that Lucas is trying to wipe the slate clean and start his life over anew.

In bed, after his first-ever anonymous hook-up, Lucas gives the audience a rare peek directly into his thoughts when he says, “I don’t like my mind right now…I’d prefer my body to take all the space.” But Lucas’s escapades aren’t merely counterproductive acts of detaching himself from his pain. Honoré, never one to scold sexual expression or exploration, also presents these incidents as a means for Lucas to expedite his transition to adulthood.

Some decisions are potentially dangerous, but Winter Boy sees Lucas’s pushing of boundaries as not merely an expression of emotional agony. It’s also part and parcel of a healing process that’s separate from his family unit. With this film, Honoré is treading on well-trodden ground, but in homing in on grief’s entanglement with nascent desire within human experience, the filmmaker mutates a familiar formula in fresh and provocative ways.