‘Close’ Review: This Belgian Buddy Story Seems So Beautifully Understated, Until Suddenly It Isn’t

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticSPOILER ALERT: The penultimate paragraph of this review contains spoilers.Few of us are fortunate enough to have a friendship as intimate and effortless as the one shared by 13-year-old Belgian boys Leo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) in “Close.” That connection, and the responsibility that comes with it, is at the heart of Lukas Dhont’s sophomore feature, so subtle and sensitive in the first half, so devastatingly false from its tragic twist on.

This beautifully evocative film, which hails from an openly queer director, offers as pure a portrait of innocent, innocuous same-sex affection as we’ve ever encountered on film.

And then it becomes something incredibly, unwelcomely different. “Close” marks an auspicious return to the Cannes Film Festival for Dhont, whose 2018 Camera d’Or-winning debut, “Girl,” was simultaneously ahead of and behind the cultural conversation about trans youth.

That remarkable first film dramatized the journey of an impatient teen anxious to become a ballerina, but cast a cisgender boy to tell that story, earning directing and acting prizes around the world, and pushback from the trans community in the U.S.