For an hour, Dhont’s film is as exact a picture of a boy learning to be ashamed as we have seen, and Eden Dambrine, acting for the first time, carries it on his face. Then the second half arrives, and every petal falls on cue.
Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) are thirteen and have never been apart. They run through the flower fields Léo’s family farms, sleep in one bed at Rémi’s house, and make up stories about armies hiding in the beds of dahlias. Then school starts, and a girl at the lunch table asks whether they are together. Léo laughs. Lukas Dhont’s second feature, written with Angelo Tijssens, is about what he does after laughing, and for its first hour it is as exact a picture of a boy learning to be ashamed as we have seen. Then something has to happen, and what happens is a little too well made.
We recommend it, chiefly for that first hour and for two performances. Dambrine had not acted before this, and it does not show, or rather it shows in the right way: nothing he does is pitched at us. Watch him in the playground after the question. He does not stop being Rémi’s friend. He stands a step further away, and Frank van den Eeden’s camera is close enough that we can see him decide to. The scene that got at us is smaller still. The two boys are in Rémi’s bed, as they always are, and Léo gets up without a word and lies down on the mattress on the floor. We felt something very like grief, and all that had happened was a boy moving four feet.
Van den Eeden shoots in warm daylight, mostly close, often at the boys’ eye level, so the adults tend to arrive as torsos and hands. The flower fields are photographed in flat oranges and pinks rather than as postcards, which is why they work. Manu Verschueren dresses the boys in the same bright colours as the crops, and when Léo takes up ice hockey and pulls a caged helmet over his face the change reads without anyone saying it. Alain Dessauvage cuts farm work, planting, picking, the tractor, in among the school scenes so the season passes in the flowers. Valentin Hadjadj’s score is strings, and for a long time it stays out of the way.
At around the halfway mark the film turns on an event we will not describe. What we can say is that from then on it is largely about Léo and Rémi’s mother, Sophie, and that Émilie Dequenne is the best thing in the second half. She plays a woman being kind to a boy because there is nobody else left to be kind to, and she does it with almost no dialogue. Léa Drucker, as Léo’s mother Nathalie, and Igor van Dessel, as his older brother Charlie, are given less and are good with it. Kevin Janssens, as the father Peter, is mostly a pair of shoulders in a doorway, which we think is deliberate.
The second half is also where the design shows. Every image answers an earlier image. The flowers are cut when the story needs them cut. The score that had been so patient comes in to make sure we have understood, and the scenes at the rink and in the kitchen start to feel like stations on a route rather than things that happened to people. We wept, and within the same ten minutes we were irritated at how precisely we had been steered towards weeping, which is a strange thing to report about a film we admire. Most critics have been warmer than us. The reviews so far treat the second half as the proof of the film. We think it is the weak half, and that the first half did not need proving.
Dhont’s first film, Girl (2018), drew complaints for how it handled its subject, and several critics have gone into this one wary. It is a more careful film, and a more honest one about how boys police each other: nobody here uses a slur, and nobody needs to. Among films about the end of childhood, the first hour stands with the best of them. The second is a well-made film about loss of a kind we have sat through before.
It is 104 minutes and a 12A. Take a thirteen-year-old if you have one. Do not expect them to want to talk about it in the car.
