Close (Lukas Dhont, 2022).
Heavy-handed and voyeuristic, Lukas Dhont’s first film, Girl (2018), deserved its share of backlash. Following the travails of a teenage transgender ballet dancer—played by cis-male actor Victor Polster, one of many controversial choices—Girl approaches its heroine with apparent empathy, but ultimately conflates trans identity with relentless physical and psychological carnage. “What could have been a thoughtful exploration of a difficult part of a trans girl’s daily life,” writes Hollywood Reporter critic Oliver Whitney, “instead uses her body as a site of trauma, inviting the audience to react with disgust.” Hyperbolizing the challenges of gender transition, a process that is by definition already dramatic, Girl exposes the dangers of representation from a vantage of ignorance. The film climaxes with a scene of self-castration via scissors—an unlikely act, not to mention a heedlessly cruel one.
Five years later, Dhont’s second feature, Close (2022), averts these issues, in part by exploring an experience the director has endured firsthand: coming of age as a sensitive young man who learns quickly how vulnerability clashes with masculine norms. Like Girl, Close is set in Belgium—this time in the Francophone Flemish countryside—and depicts thirteen-year-old best friends Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav de Waele), whose bond is tested when they start high school. While their connection is never explicitly romantic or sexual, in both their open affection and constant physical proximity, they appear, as a group of girls point out on the very first day, “very close” and are accused of being “together.” When Léo, the more androgynous of the pair, becomes the target of emasculating taunts, he distances himself from his friend, often with a maddening tinge of passive aggression. In response, Rémi—who, it is suggested earlier in the film, already grapples with anxiety—starts to unravel, breaking down both at home and in public. “It’s nothing, Rémi,” Léo gently scolds when his friend confronts him in the schoolyard. “Stop crying.”
The triumph of Dhont’s second film, and its obvious superiority to his first, lies in how carefully and perceptively Close navigates ambiguity and depicts male anguish—both its strategic repression and reluctant expression. When, forty minutes into the film, we learn that Rémi has committed suicide (significantly, the phrase itself is never used), the scene is about as restrained as it could possibly be. “He’s no longer here,” Léo’s mother tells her son in the empty bus that, in light of the tragedy, has hastily returned from a class field trip. What follows is not a torturous scene of Rémi’s lifeless body, his mother bawling beside a casket, nor even a single image of a casket. Instead, the next hour immerses us entirely in Léo’s perspective as he grapples with the loss of his friend, a loss tethered to his unbearable guilt. A gradual, often lyrical excavation of male interiority, the last two acts eschew cheap catharsis or resolution.
And yet, despite the film’s exceedingly understated tenor, the sheer existence of conspicuous male emotions onscreen has inspired critics to accuse Dhont of melodrama and bathos. “What follows [the end of Rémi’s and Léo’s friendship] is many, many scenes of actors crying,” vents Silvi Vann-Wall for Screenhub. “I found myself strangely devoid of tears, however, as I became all too aware of the way my emotions were being manipulated.” Here it might be fitting to ask, just what makes for a “manipulative” film versus a moving one? Vann-Wall rejects what they believe is a didactic lesson on toxic masculinity—and I would do the same if I felt that was all the film was doing. Instead, Close does something much more ambitious: it takes adolescent (and adult) male loss seriously, along with displays of overt sorrow that render the male body as scarily out of control—out of control in ways that, crucially, the camera itself is not.
It is precisely the maleness of these emotional displays that puts some viewers off, unaccustomed as they are to honest depictions of male grief, perhaps especially in adolescence. “Remove Dhont's artful composition,” argues ABC Australia’s Michael Sun, “and we’re left with a weepy melodrama about grieving families that Hollywood has already made many times over (see: Manchester by the Sea, Rabbit Hole, even My Girl).” Here it’s worth pointing out that most of the caterwauling in these American movies comes by way of its female cast. Like so many grief-stricken men on screen, Casey Affleck’s character in Manchester (2016) diffuses his pain in booze-fueled wrath, erupting in tears as explosively as he might throw a chair or lash out at his wife, whose crying is much more believable. Rabbit Hole (2010) is primarily a vehicle for Nicole Kidman to pretty-cry, and My Girl (1991) follows an adolescent girl whose weeping is prompted by the death of her boy bestie by bee-sting. In Close, not only do Rémi and Léo cry openly at several intervals, but so too does Rémi’s father Peter (Kevin Janssens) at a dinner at Léo’s family’s house a few months after losing his son. When Léo’s older brother Charlie (Igor van Dessel) speaks of his plans after graduation, Peter hunches over his plate, quaking at the realization that he will never see Rémi grow up and get a job. “I’m sorry,” he tells his silent dining companions. Meanwhile, his wife (Léa Drucker) smiles numbly and goes outside.
If Close is “melodramatic” because it dares to explore—and express—male grief in a direct, if aesthetically attuned, manner, how much does that say about what we expect as viewers? When it comes to depictions of suffering, what is it about sentimentality that pains us so? And how or why is it that this becomes even more painful between boys or men?
Close (Lukas Dhont, 2022).
In her 2017 book Tough Enough, Deborah Nelson unpacks the patent lack of sentimentality among six twentieth-century female writers, arguing that each paid for her choice to represent “painful reality” given the gendered expectations of women to soften the blow. When it comes to male suffering in literature and film, Nelson points out the pervasive role of the stoic tradition. “[W]e have seen how emotional response is deflected upon the viewers of the male sufferer or sympathizer,” she argues, citing film scholar Tania Modleski, who coined the “male melodrama” genre in 2010 (take any Eastwood film; the actor and director allegedly told Meryl Streep, “people don’t want to see me cry onscreen”). “Real men [in this genre] do not cry,” claims Modleski, “or at best they shed only a few hard-wrung tears; others do the crying for them—usually women or people of color.”
In Dhont’s Close, that doesn’t happen. Combining evocative camerawork, scant dialogue, and (sometimes unremitting) long takes, the film trusts the power of the male body itself to relay critical, often complicated, information. On two occasions before Rémi takes his own life (which, crucially, we do not see), we witness the boy cry—each time intensifying in degree. In a close-up level with his face, the focus shifting between him and his parents at breakfast (similar to the scene in which his father cries), Rémi slowly blinks back tears the morning after Léo refuses to sleep beside him; he feigns a tummy ache above an untouched plate Léo eyes from across the table. Later, after Léo jilts him on the bike ride to school, Rémi lunges at his friend on the playground, arms flailing, eyes streaming for what seems like an endless eighteen seconds. With the camera steadily trained on Rémi as bystanders silently ogle, the scene is hardly melodramatic: we observe Rémi, and the friendship, unravel in what feels like real time. Léo’s comparably blank response is just as painful to perceive, as it betrays the pressure he is under to pretend he doesn’t care.
Under Modleski’s terms, Close also cannot qualify as a “male melodrama,” as it overtly, if selectively, lays bare male suffering (if anything, the women in the film more often seem impassive). In the months following Rémi’s death, Léo embraces stoicism as an effective coping mechanism, hurling himself into the hockey rink boards during daily drills as a means to transform his guilt into physical pain. When at last he breaks his arm on the ice, it provides an opportunity to mourn. As his cast is wrapped by a hospital nurse in a medium shot that lasts nearly a minute and a half, Léo stares at the man’s gloved hands and quietly starts to cry. His father—a flower farmer and gentle patriarch—clearly realizes that the injury isn’t the reason for Léo’s sobs. “A broken arm does hurt, right?” he says, kissing his son’s temple.
Just as female authors need to be, as Nelson puts it, “unusually thoughtful…about the choice to be unsentimental,” so too, I would argue, do male auteurs need to be judicious in how they deploy sentiment from or between male characters. Trained as we are to expect a stoic front from a male protagonist—no matter how much he suffers—witnessing a demonstrative adolescent boy or man is likely to prompt discomfort or overreaction. “Extremely accomplished but still only 31 years old, Dhont may still have some of his own growing up to do,” David Erhlich wrote in response to Close, claiming that the director “default[s] to universal pain whenever he fears that more personal feelings may be too poignantly ethereal to see on camera.” But what of Léo’s pain seems remotely universal? If anything, it registers as so individually endured and deeply felt that it resists typical representation.
To grasp the weakness of this type of criticism against Close, we need only reverse the genders. Would we feel that a thirteen-year-old girl bawling onscreen were too much? Or that suicide by a teenage girl would prompt pain that is “universal”? Or is it that, along with emotional drama and self-destruction, the particulars of interiority are simply more familiar for women and girls onscreen, such that the opposite jars by comparison? As we gradually learn through the way that the camera attends to Dambrine’s keenly expressive face and body, Léo isn’t any thirteen-year-old boy: he is a specific boy whose guilt is just as specific.
The Eight Mountains (Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, 2022).
Released three months after Close, another Belgian film about two fiercely tight male friends can be found in The Eight Mountains, directed by Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen. Like Close, The Eight Mountains begins with an adolescent male friendship during a bucolic summer—in this case, an Italian village in 1984. Eleven-year-old Pietro (Lupo Barbiero), from industrial Turin, meets his other half in Bruno (Cristiano Sassella), a scrappy local he meets on vacation to the Alps with his mother. But while Close relies on the incredible expressive capacity of its actors to convey the emotional stakes, The Eight Mountains does something more conservative, relying on voice-over adapted from Paolo Cognetti’s novel to relay the protagonist’s inner hopes and fears. “My life seemed partly that of a man, partly that of a boy,” an adult Pietro (Luca Marinelli) recounts as he returns to the village, and to Bruno (played now by Alessandro Borghi), after his estranged father dies. Over the film’s two and a half hours, the unlikely buddies follow wildly different trajectories, reuniting for brief stretches at a mountain cabin that Pietro inherits and Bruno restores. While The Eight Mountains lacks the possibility of queerness that underlies the friendship in Close, the films share certain sensibilities and narrative turns that crystallize the complexities of communicating emotionality between men, especially when its very expression juts against masculine norms. But where Close relies on visuals to convey personal connection and loss, The Eight Mountains embraces language—specifically Pietro’s past-tense narration, presumably written then read aloud—at the expense, arguably, of everything else.
As in Close, the less physically hardy of the pair, Pietro, seems initially more insecure in his masculinity—conveyed perhaps most cogently when, as a child, he struggles, dizzy with altitude sickness, to follow his father and Bruno up the Alps. While Bruno’s rugged self-reliance and, later, traditional roles as husband and father initially inspire envy—“I have reached the top of the mountain,” he brags—by the end of the film, these traits bring about his undoing. Dividing Pietro and Bruno are matters of economic class of little relevance to Close; under late capitalism, the film suggests, Bruno’s mountain-man ways won’t cut it, and as such, it is the more masculine friend who takes his own life. “Don’t worry about me,” he tells Pietro before isolating himself in the cabin midwinter, presumably freezing to death. Upon hearing of his friend’s disappearance, Pietro barely bats an eye, his face in profile against nighttime traffic. “They’ll find him when the snow melts,” Bruno’s former wife tells him on the phone, her voice resigned.
As the film vacillates between drone shots of nature and long or extreme long shots of the men within nature, their experiences seem relevant only insofar as they are one with the sublime. Rarely do we see their faces express pain, joy, or vulnerability; the extent to which they know one another seems based purely on their shared rejection of societal hypocrisy and their embrace of the uncorrupted outdoors. In many ways, the dramatic terrain itself stands in for emotional conflict, dwarfing the interior states of the main characters.
If most international critics have reveled in the film’s emotional restraint, not all are happy about it. “The Eight Mountains is not only slow in its action…but also nearly devoid of ideas or, at least, of their expression,” claims Richard Brody, lamenting the film’s “libertarian” celebration of “blissful isolation” from the turmoil of modern life. I would add that the movie qualifies as an example of “male melodrama” that Modleski defined over a decade ago. As moving as The Eight Mountains can be, it relies on others—primarily wives, mothers, and the audience—to suffer for the men who cannot express their pain themselves. With its jaw-dropping backdrops, the film also seems to say that a desire to be one with nature is perhaps the only way for a real man to redeem himself. “I wondered who had known him, besides me on this earth,” Pietro reflects during a final montage of ice melting into a babbling brook, “and who had known me, besides Bruno?” The arrogance of such a question—its loneliness repackaged as self-determination—reinforces the myth that real men cannot be known by others, or even fully know themselves. As seductive as this philosophy can be, it forestalls the possibility of a rich interior life, of a self that is worth getting to know—onscreen or otherwise.
By contrast, Close goes for a slow burn in which our hero heals in fits and spurts between long stretches of repression and latent masochism. Self-forgiveness, Dhont suggests, is possible only when one grows to know the self one needs to forgive. In honoring the depths of Léo’s interiority, and in deftly, deliberately validating the anguish both he and Rémi feel, Close skirts the confines of both the traditional and “male” melodrama genres—and does so in ways that both national and international moviegoers have yet to critically unpack. Let’s hope that in the coming years, Dhont affords us multiple opportunities to do so.