Close (Flemish, 2022)
Director: Lukas Dhont
Director: Lukas Dhont
If growing up is not difficult enough, maturing from a teenager to morph into a young adult and pave a future for himself, now he has to deal with his sexuality. He is now cornered to be assigned a gender at increasingly diabolical ages. Children used to have a sweet phase of their life called childhood where they could play, be carefree and explore things as and when they find fit. Things happened naturally. Now, there is a rush to compartmentalise. In certain localities, part of the educators' scope of duties includes identifying students trapped in a wrongly assigned gendered body. Psychological assessments would legitimatise pubertal blockers, hormonal therapy and as far as gender reassignment surgeries. And the parents may not need to consent to all these interventions on their pre-teen kids.
The sad thing is that sometimes science gets it wrong. So do the nimble impressionable minds. Detransitioning or seeking for reversal of gender transitioning is a real thing.
This Belgian candidature for the Oscar tells an emotional story of two 13-year-old boys, Léo and Rémi, who happened to be very close friends. They grew up together and their families were close. As they move into middle school, the nature of their closeness is frowned upon by their classmates. Léo, the athletic one, denies that they are a couple. Rémi, the artistic one, actually secretly harbours passionate feelings. As Léo increasingly distances himself from Rémi, the next thing that the school hears is that Rémi commits suicide. The rest of the story is about how Léo deals with the guilt of rejecting Rémi's advances and the loss of his best friend.
A slow-moving drama with intense close-ups filled with emotion. Recommended for the romantics.
