Bloom of youth

The director of Oscar-nominated coming-of-age drama Close talks about how his own adolescence inspired the film.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

Lukas Dhont would appear to be a young man in a hurry. The 31-year-old Belgian director's second feature, Close, an affecting, intimate tale of boyhood friendship, debuted at the Cannes Film Festival a year ago. There, the youngest director in the event's main competition won the Grand Prix, the second place to the Palme D'Or. This year, it was also one of five Oscar nominees for best foreign film, losing out to German World War I epic All Quiet on the Western Front, having harvested festival prizes around the world.

Close follows Dhont's 2018 debut, Girl, another teenage story, about a young transgender ballerina and inspired by Belgian dancer Nora Monsecour.

It was also widely acclaimed after debuting at Cannes, where it won the Queer Palm, though it also came in for criticism for casting a nontransgender actor in the lead role, its depiction of transgender bodies and hormone therapy, among other issues.

With Close, Dhont, whose first artistic ambition was as a dancer, is in autobiographical territory, the story drawing on his own experiences as a gay kid growing up in rural Belgium and friendships he had lost or felt he had betrayed along the way.

His two 13-year-old leads, Léo and Rémi (Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele), are inseparable friends whose flower-farming families treat them like brothers. That is until they start high school, where their new classmates wonder if they are "together".

Rémi, the quiet oboe prodigy, initially doesn't care about the teasing. But Léo starts to withdraw from the relationship, taking up the manly pursuit of ice hockey and leaving his friend bereft. A tragedy ensues. 

A call from the Listener finds Dhont in his hometown of Ghent, in the country's Flemish region. The following conversation contains spoilers.