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 only phrase I can really think of to convey what happened to me over the course of the film, during which I could at times not see the screen through water; I cried, not with a steady stream of silent tears, but tensed over in racking convulsions, in a way I haven’t wept since the funeral of a schoolfriend 23 years ago. At the end of the film, before meeting friends to head home, I had to find a secluded corner in which to try and compose myself, but the sobs kept coming like aftershocks. Close, I think, touched something deep within me; what I saw on screen, in a way I never have before, was an encapsulation of my childhood as a fey, hopeful boy; my own precociousness and psychological acuity, which disguised my utter innocence. These two little boys with their bond more close than friendship; their skinny legs in big shorts, their big eyes; their taste for conversation: Dhont is too delicate to characterise them as gay, or pre-gay, but it’s their sensitivity that stands out, a sensitivity that cannot last as they grow up into young men. A sensitivity that marks them as different. 

Close spoke to me of so much that I had felt and lost in my own childhood - the pleasure of running for the sheer fuck of it, until exhaustion; my potent desire to talk to a friend’s mother (?); the awful feeling, at school, of other children possibly being on to you. The boys in Close live in a world far more free than the one I grew up in, but it brought back, in a way that was nigh on unbearable, the tension I had known on so many occasions, when shame began to encroach on life’s previously simple delights, under the eye of other people, who seemed to know things about you. Plying your body, your essence, to the demands of others; complying with rules that you don’t understand; not saying what might be on the tip of your tongue; having to become terse and sullen where you had been carefree; lying: these things, once lived, seep into your bones, and they only come out, later, by an effort of scraping, scraping away at yourself with a sharp, hooked tool.

Between the ages of eight and eighteen, say, if any boy of my acquaintance should confess to any vulnerability, or should strike up conversation with me and at least one girl simultaneously, I would be overwhelmed with joy, flooded with relief at this irruption of freedom into my world, at somebody revealing that they spoke my language. Returning to the city once from a long weekend away with a gang of friends at the age of sixteen or so, I asked my friend Paul what he would do when he got home, and experienced a hot flush of joy when he said, “Probably have a bath, cry, and have another bath - and then maybe another cry.” That another boy cried was elating in itself, but that he should confess it to me so openly was like a gift from the gods. I was hungry to hear it. Yet I knew that I myself could never say such a thing at school, certainly not to a boy; I had so much more to lose than him by the revelation. 

I remembered moments of shame, tied to a sense of my self that I could not articulate - such as when, aged 10 or 11, I was invited by a girl in my class to a birthday party at which I was to be the only boy in attendance. I was more than happy at that state of affairs, but a sense prevailed that this was a contravention of some unspoken laws; I didn’t tell any boys about it, and lied to my parents about the party, making up boys who had been there as well. 

I remembered wanting to plait girls’ hair: when my sister had a friend over, they would fuss about each other, try clothes on, and style each other’s hair; and what I really wanted was to practise weaving the three strands of hair together, an elastic band around my wrist, which I would then artlessly slip on to the completed plait. I think I felt that impetus in my body as something that I was drawn towards, and could feel the holding back in my body, from that activity that was forbidden to me. 

All the times I didn’t own up to being afraid; all the moments I felt ashamed of crying, as an added coat of misery on top of whatever it was that had made me cry in the first place. 

A time when a friend of mine at school laughingly remarked that I had faggy body language, and I felt myself go hot all over. How had I not been conscious of how I stood, how I held myself, what my voice sounded like? 

Close, an imperfect film perhaps, is blessed especially in its first half with beautiful, intelligent actors, and writing of consummate finesse, showing a time of heartstopping loveliness, when its protagonists are not yet aware of themselves, in the warm last days of summer, before the return to school. These prelapsarian times are depicted with perhaps too much honeyed gorgeousness, daring to imagine a utopia in which two children can live in innocent joy and wonder. Those scenes seize you with their fragility, because they cannot last; to look at this contentment might kill it, like Orpheus seeing Eurydice briefly before she disappears forever. Then, the world slowly chips away at all this sweetness, as the boys rub up against the niceties and expectations of society. True joy - the heedless, shiny-eyed joy of the very young - can only be replaced with a careworn facsimile of that joy; a diminishing-returns replica, tarnished with self-knowledge. A heavy tear welling up in those big eyes, as if carried from deep within, signified to me my own paradise lost, and I felt the terrible weight of the grief I saw. 

Sensitivity is difficult to discuss in film, but Close often finds the rights words, or the right image, to get across a particular feeling; there is delicacy in the way Dhont observes the boys’ lithe and bonny gladness, and how he adroitly tempers that carefree quality with, well, cares; small and big concerns that take an eroding knock at the boys’ spirit, like waves lapping or sometimes crashing against a slowly receding coastline. 

I’ll go to watch Close one more time, and in my second viewing the needle will be duller; it won’t prick as hard at whatever compromise I have come to with my selfhood over the years. I’ll emerge from the film as night has fallen, an adult who has a place in the world.