Lukas Dhont on exploring male friendships in ‘Close’, which won at Cannes 2022 Premium

As a society, we murder beautiful friendships, says Lukas Dhont as he talks about a film on male friendships that won the Grand Prix at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival

The Belgian film, Close, which won the Grand Prix at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, portrays the friendship between two 13-year-old boys, Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele). The film, director Lukas Dhont says over a video call from London, is about the connection between these two boys. “It is about intimacy, which is often confused with sexuality. When we see men close together on screens or in stories, they are either strangling or stabbing each other.”

There was another working title, Dhont says. “It was a Walt Whitman quote, “two boys clinging together”, which was what the film was about — two boys clinging on to what is left of this almost Eden-like moment. The title was too long, and when Close came up as an option, it made complete sense.”

Angelo Tijssens, who Dhont worked with on the screenplay, quotes a Belgian poet, who talks about making a personal experience as universal as possible. “When we were writing and working with the actors, it felt like there were constantly new people coming on board to tell this story to the broadest possible audience. While the core of Close comes from us, there is a connection with audiences worldwide now that is one of the biggest gifts that we got from making this film.”

Close, Dhont says looks at how we as a society separate young men from an early age. “We have constructed a vocabulary around masculinity that is about independence, being distant and competitive, a ‘Lord of the Flies’ narrative.” We do not value the connections between young people, the 32-year-old director says.

“As a society, we murder beautiful friendships. When we tell these young men not to listen to the language of the heart, we make them performers. When we break that connection to the heart, we also create a rupture in ourselves. Close refers not only to the importance of connections to another, but also to staying connected to ourselves,” says Dhont.

Casting Close was a mammoth task involving all-day workshops. “We knew that we would need two 13-year-olds to play these incredible leads and we looked in many schools in and around Brussels,” Dhont says. When travelling on a train from Antwerp to Ghent, he observed a young boy talking to his friends. “When I saw his expressiveness, and his body language, I realised that this can be the Léo we were looking for.”

This is Dhont and Tijssens’ second collaboration after 2018’s Girl, which won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2019. When asked about the pros and cons of collaboration, Tijssens says, “Sometimes you want to smash each other’s brains, but most of the time it is a constant conversation. We write together, and I am air-quoting here, because we mainly we sit around the table, and talk about what Lukas wants.”