On a chilly winter evening in February, the 31-year-old Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont found himself at the Griffith Observatory, on a field trip of sorts with his two teenage actors Eden Dambrine and Gustav de Waele. It was the group’s third week in Los Angeles, where they’d been promoting Dhont’s film Close, a coming-of-age drama about adolescent loneliness and burgeoning masculinity that’s nominated for the Best International Feature Oscar. They used a rare break in the schedule to visit one of LA’s moodiest, most cinematic landmarks, one that’s been immortalized as a site of angst-on-celluloid dating all the way back to Rebel Without a Cause.
High above the city, Dhont watched his two leads take the moment in with genuine awe and excitement. “You know, the amazing thing with this journey is that I get to spend it with a 14 and a 16 year old who are in the States for the first time,” Dhont says. “Through their eyes, I’m understanding the absurdity of it all, and just really living in the moment.” (During a screening of the film at an AMC theater, Dhont and the boys found the poster of their film, featuring the two teenagers in an embrace, hanging beside the poster for Titanic’s rerelease, featuring Jack and Rose in similar repose. The teenagers, true to form, gamely posed for a winking recreation.)
“[Awards campaigns], like many competitions in life, sort of [has] set rules that seem to be about a destination,” Dhont tells me. “It’s so easy to forget about the journey. As an adult moving through life, sometimes you are so focused on getting somewhere. With teenagers, it is absolutely the opposite. They’re like, ‘Ooh, a palm tree. Ooh, great chocolate milk.’”
Close (now available to rent online) tells the story of Léo and Rémi, two 13-year-old boys whose close friendship encounters a society suspicious of male intimacy. Those suspicions eventually chip away at the pair’s bond and the film shows the ultimately devastating effects of those gender expectations. Dhont renders an almost anthropological study of masculinity in Close, making a case for male intimacy as something instinctive and innate, before social conditioning determines it irregular and distrustful.
“You will never hear me use the term toxic masculinity,” Dhont tells me. “I do not believe [toxic behavior] is necessarily masculine… When you listen to young boys, they will tell you just how much they long for vulnerability, for nurturing, for connectedness. Too often, we depict them as the opposite.”
Dhont made Close with his brother Michiel as one of the producers. “I am gay [too],” Michiel, who’s two years younger than Lukas, tells me. In a way, Close is also Michiel’s story. “Around me, other male friends or even girls, they didn’t quite understand what we were going through… During that time, [my male friends] pushed away so strongly at that idea, that I was quite alone in that. I think when Lukas and I really came together, we could share those emotions [with each other].”
Raymond Ang
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