Boyhood collides with masculinity in Oscar-nominated 'Close'
When Lukas Dhont was 12, a camera was thrust into his hands.
When Lukas Dhont was 12, a camera was thrust into his hands. For Dhont, who would come out as gay as a young adult, the camera was an escape from the strains and stereotypes he was beginning to feel pushed on him.
“I needed this other reality in which I could disappear because my own reality was one where I very much felt the pressures of these expectations and these codes and these norms that were put upon my body just because I was male,” the 31-year-old Belgian filmmaker says.
In his first home movies, Dhont created silly sci-fi shorts. His brother Michiel (now Dhont’s producer) would play an alien or a zombie. Later, Dhont discovered a wider movie world through things like the films of Chantal Akerman, and realized that cinema could be a place to confront reality, not run from it.
“I stopped filming the zombies and turned the camera toward me,” says Dhont.
Dhont’s second film, “Close,” dives back into that period of adolescence that was so formative for him. Set in the Belgian countryside, it’s about a friendship between two 13-year-old boys — Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) — whose tender intimacy is tested, tragically, when Léo, seeking to fit in with other, more macho boys, pushes Rémi away.
Rating: 5