{"id":4477,"date":"2023-01-30T21:17:27","date_gmt":"2023-01-31T02:17:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/?p=4477"},"modified":"2023-01-30T21:25:05","modified_gmt":"2023-01-31T02:25:05","slug":"4477","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/30\/4477\/","title":{"rendered":"Close"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The Belgian director Lukas Dhont spotted Eden Dambrine, an eleven-year-old French dance student, on a train and asked him to audition for his latest film <em>Close<\/em> (2022). Among the youth\u2019s qualities were his \u201cvery big eyes.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In discussing film acting, the great director Nicholas Ray\u2014<em>They Live by Night <\/em>(1948), <em>Johnny Guitar<\/em> (1954) and <em>Rebel Without a Cause <\/em>(1955)\u2014observed, \u201cYou must act so your eyes will be visible to us.\u201d For the entirety of <em>Close<\/em>, a story about the fallout of a friendship between two young boys, L\u00e9o (Dambrine) and R\u00e9mi (Gustav De Waele), Dambrine\u2019s eyes prove riveting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What\u2019s so fascinating about the state between childhood and adolescence is that kids feel emotions so intently, but are unable to cope with them or articulate what is going on inside them. And then there is peer pressure that compounds and confuses those emotions through prescriptions on behavior like \u201cthe need to fit in\u201d and ideas of masculinity. As the 31-year-old director notes, \u201cIt\u2019s important to talk about what we deprive these men of, from an early age, and that\u2019s a true sense of connection. It feels urgent to talk about that other way of thinking: vulnerability and tenderness.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dhont\u2019s semi-autobiographical film captures that aspect of growing up so brilliantly, it is no wonder that <em>Close <\/em>won the Grand Prix at Cannes and just received an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film. The less said about the plot, the better, but I have to say that Dhont\u2019s film goes for the throat and doesn\u2019t ever let go. Dambrine\u2019s face conveys an incredible sense of depth and mystery\u2014qualities we don\u2019t necessarily associate with kids\u2014as well as the kind of deep pain that reminded me of that conveyed by Jean-Pierre L\u00e9aud as Antoine in Francois Truffaut\u2019s New Wave masterpiece <em>The 400 Blo<\/em>ws<em> <\/em>(1959).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Belgian director Lukas Dhont spotted Eden Dambrine, an eleven-year-old French dance student, on a train and asked him to audition for his latest film Close (2022). Among the youth\u2019s qualities were his \u201cvery big eyes.\u201d In discussing film acting,<a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/30\/4477\/\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4474,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[97,1],"tags":[99,102,98,103],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4477"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4477"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4480,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4477\/revisions\/4480"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}