“ENZO” REVIEW: LAURENT CANTET’S FINAL PORTRAIT OF YOUTH IS SUN-KISSED AND HEARTFELT
words by SONNY NGO
In a subtly blush depiction of adolescence, Laurent Cantet’s Enzo is an exploration of growing pains, class, and sexuality. Though credited as a film by Cantet, it is longtime collaborator and friend Robin Campillo (120 BPM) who brought the screenplay to life after Cantet’s unfortunate passing last year. In his final project, he portrays teenagehood’s messy awkwardness with candour and tenderness, but above all else with understanding.
image via cineart.nl
The film opens on a construction site with the 16-year old Enzo (debutant Eloy Pohu) preparing concrete under the fierce sun. Despite his privileged background – he lives in a stunning villa with a clear blue swimming pool outlooking the French countryside – he has quit school and instead started a masonry apprenticeship. If it wasn’t for his parents’ reputable standing, he would have been fired already. Like most kids his age, he is painfully average: he sings along to rap music, flirts with girls, and is embarrassingly bad at brick layering. His father, an established engineer and professor, views this physical labour as self-destructive and urges him to pursue art school, where he can further develop his drawing talent. But Enzo stays put, as every deviant teenager.
Then there is Vlad (newcomer Maksym Slivinskyi), a somewhat older Ukrainian co-worker wondering whether or not to join the fight against Russia back home. Despite Vlad expressing his fears of going to war, Enzo idolises him. In his mind, he is a confident womanizer (this appears to be true), a gritty grown-up representing importance and independence. What is more admirable than the heroic act of fighting for freedom? More pragmatic, rebellious, and hands-dirtier than this? Enzo’s admiration for Vlad is crystal clear, standing in stark contrast to Enzo’s own teenage uncertainties. As they continue to spend the summer together, this praise towards Vlad softly turns into romantic affection, though perhaps the reverse happened first – the film remains ambiguous in this.
image via cineart.nl
Comparisons with Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name were inbound. There is the blaring sun, fashionable short shorts, an intimate phone call, and the neverending hum of cicadas after all. Yet, Enzo is a much lighter film, decidedly more concerned with coming-of-age than with coming out. Although both themes of first love and queerness are addressed, Campillo seemingly extrapolates these ideas into wider frameworks of alienation, loneliness and understanding – matters every teenager has had, or will have, to deal with at some point. Still, the film is very much about desire too; in persistent glances, lingering touches, and quiet moments. Much of this rests on novice actor Pohu, who has this amazing quasi-absence look on his face which captures these intimacies all too well.
Campillo has beautifully showcased the simultaneously brief and everlasting anxieties of first love. And perhaps it is in Enzo’s fantastical idolisation of Vlad that youth is best expressed: a short outburst of daydreaming, adrift from harsh responsibilities dawning down on teenagers during the rapid fire changes in their lives. The film offers a precise description of adolescence and the pursuit, or rather discovery, of oneself. Enzo, caught between external pressures and his own uncertainties, finds himself in a limbo of staying true to himself while also acknowledging that he might not even know who that self is yet. It’s a journey that follows him throughout the movie and it is awkward and humiliating at times, often subtle, and most certainly unforgettable.
In an atypical collaboration between Cantet and Campillo, both artists shine incredibly bright. For Campillo, the film features some of his most delicate and assured directing, while for Cantet, the film marks a stunningly gracious swan song. Having premiered at the Directors’ fortnight during Cannes earlier this year, Enzo is now screening in Dutch theatres.