(Cannes) Talent does not wait for years: a 15-year-old teenager, Eden Dambrine, bought a ticket for a possible prize at Cannes in his first role, heartbreaking, of a boy bruised by a friendship lost in Close Belgian Lukas Dhont.
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four years later Girla drama about a transsexual teenager passionate about dance, awarded the Camera d’or (best first film) on the Croisette in 2018, the 31-year-old Belgian director, the youngest in the competition, confirms his talent for filming this age of life, and the “violence of being forced to conform to the norm”, with this drama (1 h 45), full of poetry.
Shot at the height of children, the film, in the running for the Palme d’or, follows Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav de Waele), two thirteen-year-old boys, lifelong friends.
The carelessness of their childhood in the Belgian countryside, punctuated by the harvest of flowers in the fields as far as the eye can see that surround their homes, will be impacted by the entrance to college.
Suddenly, the gaze of their congeners on this friendship that is too fusional, too physical in their eyes, will interfere: if Rémi does not change anything in his behavior, Léo will gradually move away, eager to do more “boy to better stick to the dominant male norm: ice hockey and burgers, rather than country walks and inventions of stories.
“Friends since forever, Léo and Rémi are too much”close“(close, Ed) in the eyes of others, they will be judged a lot, especially when Leo will want to be in the group of cool boys”, summarizes Eden Dambrine.
The meeting of this frail blond, son of real estate agents, with the director Lukas Dhont? “It was a bit of fate, I was on the train with some friends when suddenly a man asked me ‘do you want to make movies?’ I said “yes”, and I called my mom! “, laughs the one who was then 11 years old, revealing with a smile his braces.
” Broken Heart “
“fate or chance” of fate, while Girl immersed his character in the world of classical dance, Lukas Dhont explains that he was unaware, when choosing him, that Eden Dambrine was a dancer, a student at the Royal Ballet School of Antwerp: “dancing helped me a lot to be a perfectionist and well focused” on the set, says the one who left his two brothers and three sisters for boarding school.
“Eden has a huge talent, he really knows how to act, he’s an actor”, abounds Lukas Dhont, who says he was immediately struck by “his very strong energy and his elegance”. Exactly what he needed for this second film, which deals after Girl to deal with “the themes of identity, of masculinity”.
Questions that go back to the filmmaker’s childhood. “As a child and teenager, I was very lonely, I felt like I belonged neither to the group of girls nor to the group of boys”, like the characters in Closehe says.
But in adolescence, “when labels come into life […] I had the feeling of losing friendships because of a fear of physicality, of closeness, because the gaze of others wanted to give me a label, I was seen as very effeminate,” he continues.
The filmmaker, who won the “Queer Palm”, the prize for the best film related to LGBT issues at Cannes in 2018, considers Close like a movie queer »?
“In a certain sense yes, because it is linked to themes that are very queer », « but beyond that the film is about intimate friendship and that is very universal. Having a friend who transforms, and you lose all of a sudden, can really leave you heartbroken.”