After “Girl”, winner of the Camera d’Or in 2018, Lukas Dhont continues his exploration of the end of childhood as a process of transformation and vacillation.
We discover the Belgian Lukas Dhont in 2018 at the Cannes Film Festival, where Girl, his first feature film is selected in the Un certain regard section. The story of a young boy who wants to change sex and become a star dancer, a long ordeal that he will climb with the attentive and loving help of his father. Ten days later, the film won the Camera d’Or (best first feature film) and made its young director known throughout the world.
This one returns today, at 31, in official competition, digging its furrow: adolescence as a process of transformation and vacillation, interiority as a lyrical continent to explore and magnify, the extreme attention paid to gestures and triviality, the emotional and romantic loneliness of desire and. On a formal level, one should be able to imagine the meeting between the Dardenne brothers and Xavier Dolan.
This is a story of friendship. Rémi (Gustav De Waele) and Léo (Eden Dambrine), teenagers entering secondary school, form an elective-friendly duo, not to say fusion. They seem to do everything together. The games, the fights, the entertainment, the nights spent together, and until high school, which they integrate into the same class. The mothers of one and the other consider them almost as their two sons. In the hectic rush of school life, in the chaos and vociferations of playgrounds, their complicity, their thoughtfulness, and their tenderness for each other attract the attention of their classmates. Some girls suspect them of being a real couple.
Awareness
It would seem that this simple remark – posed however without aggressiveness – inaugurates, in Leo, an awareness of what, until then, was lived in the sensual, vitalist innocence of a prolonged childhood. The two friends obviously have a very different relationship to exteriority, to the way we look at them. A more aggressive hand-to-hand combat than usual, a furious gesture of rejection, the visible signs of a friendship that is forming between Leo and another student, a passing coldness from Leo towards his friend, it will take no more to ravage Rémi, a hypersensitive boy who will experience the situation in an increasingly tragic way. The film, thus, will inexorably tip over towards an ordeal of separation, guilt and remorse.