On Close, or Paradise Lost
I’ve become annoyed lately with people asserting that such and such a film, or book, or television show “broke” them. Hyperbole is the internet’s shared language, of course, and we all fall victim to it: films “destroyed” or “ruined” us; we were “in pieces” at the end. Such phrases are so common as to have become practically meaningless - besides which, the fact that someone cried at a film tells me almost nothing about that film if I do not know the person well; perhaps they cry easy, who’s to say? Crying is an honest reaction, but it is not a critical one: it’s easier to point to your tears than articulate an intellectual position. It feels almost like there is indulgence there; we say that a film devastated us, because in a cultural landscape where so much washes over us, we are at pains to show that our emotions are still intact; we are relieved to find ourselves still vulnerable, and readily tell others about our weeping. But Close, the new film by Lukas Dhont, broke me. It’s the