104 min | PG-13 | January 27, 2023 | A24
Two thirteen-year-old boys are inseparable until the world starts asking what they are to each other. Léo pulls away to prove he is normal. The film is about what that costs.
Léo and Rémi are thirteen and inseparable. They sleep over at each other’s houses, ride bikes through flower fields, and lie tangled together in the grass without a second thought. Then they start a new school year, and other kids ask whether they are a couple. Léo pulls away to prove he is normal, and Lukas Dhont builds the film around the small cruelties that follow. This is a study of how boys learn to police their own tenderness and what that policing destroys.
Eden Dambrine plays Léo as a boy discovering shame for the first time. His face does most of the work. He joins the ice hockey team and hardens his posture, and Dambrine shows the effort it takes to perform a masculinity that does not fit. Gustav De Waele plays Rémi as the one who refuses to retreat, and his confusion at being abandoned cuts deep. Émilie Dequenne plays Rémi’s mother Sophie with a grief that arrives quietly and then floods everything. Léa Drucker grounds the adult world as Léo’s mother Nathalie.
Dhont directs from a script he wrote with Angelo Tijssens, and he trusts silence over dialogue. Cinematographer Frank van den Eeden shoots the early scenes in warm fields of blooming flowers, then drains the color as Léo retreats into hockey rinks and gray classrooms. The camera stays close on Dambrine’s face and lets entire emotional shifts play without a word. Dhont uses the changing seasons of the flower farm as a clock for Léo’s transformation. The restraint makes the film’s central rupture land like a physical blow.
Close understands that adolescent boys destroy what they love because they are taught to fear it. Léo does nothing monstrous. He simply wants to belong, and the cost of belonging is the one relationship that made him whole. Dhont refuses to soften that arithmetic or offer easy absolution. He builds a film about the small distance a boy puts between himself and his friend and shows how that distance becomes permanent.