Close

Lukas Dhont's Close won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2022 (sharing the prize jointly with Claire Denis's Stars at Noon) and went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film. Belgium's official Oscar submission, the film also won the César for Best Foreign Film. Dhont, then thirty, had emerged with his earlier Girl (2018) as the most internationally acclaimed Flemish-Belgian director of his generation; Close consolidated that position.

Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) are two thirteen-year-old best friends in a rural Belgian village, who have grown up sleeping in each other's beds, biking through flower fields together, and existing within an unselfconscious tenderness that the film treats as the foundational love of their lives. When they begin a new school year at a larger school, peer pressure begins to police that tenderness, and the film follows the moral consequences of small adolescent acts of distancing. Émilie Dequenne, as Rémi's mother, anchors the film's adult emotional register.

Frank van den Eeden's photography of the Belgian flower fields, school corridors and family kitchens establishes the film's visual register; Valentin Hadjadj's score is restrained throughout. The two child performances are at the centre of the film's reception; Dambrine's central work has been compared to the great child performances of European cinema. Dhont's project was to take seriously the loss of pre-pubescent intimacy that adolescent socialisation imposes.