Enzo

A sensitive drama touched by melancholy, Enzo is a bittersweet farewell to the late and often great Laurent Cantet. The French filmmaker, who won the Palme d’Or for The Class in 2006, conceived the idea for this queer coming-of-age drama and retains the directing credit, but it’s his long-time writing partner Robin Campillo who shepherded it over the line. Whatever the division of labour, it’s an effective marriage of the unblinking humanism of Cantet and the observational eye of the 120 Beats per Minute director.

The rugged, sun-splashed landscapes of the Côte d’Azur provide the backdrop for a film that perfectly captures what it is to be young and uncertain in your skin. Rocky outcrops, sheer cliffs that reach to the skies, and the occasional turquoise lagoon could be metaphors for the rocky but seemingly idyllic life of 16-year-old Enzo. He’s struggling to make head or tail of his desires and the expectations – real or assumed – of his well-to-do parents, Paolo and Marion (Pierfrancesco Favino and Elodie Bouchez). 

Played by open-faced newcomer Eloy Pohu, we meet him as an apprentice on a building site in La Ciotat – the setting for Cantet and Campillo’s 2018 drama The Workshop – where his inattentiveness and inertia draws the ire of the foreman. He’s marched back to his family’s hilltop villa and asked if he really wants the gig – and why? His hands are blistered and his heart doesn’t seem to be in it. His dad points to his older brother, who has uni in Paris ahead of him, and wonders why Enzo would sacrifice his future for manual work. He rejects his family’s easy bourgeoise life for reasons he can’t articulate.

A fitting epitaph to a filmmaker who understood young people better than most

Via his unobtrusive camerawork, Campillo lets us in on another answer to the question: the handsome and fun-loving Vlad, a fellow builder who, along with his friend Miroslav (Vladislav Holyk), is Ukrainian and has the pressure of military duty hanging over him. Vlad is older and constantly boosting of his girlfriends, but Enzo senses chemistry with him. A night out with Vlad and Miroslav only clouds things further.

Additional melodrama, including a bit with a gun and Enzo’s sudden preoccupation with the war in Ukraine, feel forced. There’s enough drama in watching a young man facing up to a future that doesn’t make any sense to him; who seems on the verge of sparking a chain of events he can’t control. Enzo is a haunting reminder of what it is to be young – a fitting epitaph to a filmmaker who understood young people better than most.

In UK and Ireland cinemas now.