There’s a visual sumptuousness to Belgian-Tunisian director Zeno Graton’s French-language debut film that’s unexpected, given that it’s set in such a bleak, grey place: a juvenile detention centre for teenagers. In dreamy, intense colours, he shades a powerfully physical romance between two boys who wrestle with each other, and against a system that doesn't want them to be free.
When we first see Joe (Khalil Ben Gharbia), he’s playing by the rules. Sawing wood in the workshop. Watching patiently as other kids get visits from their families. Letting his pent-up emotions a permitted outlet in a poetry session where he spits out all his fury at a society where Arab boys like him are constantly surveilled and pushed to the edges. But the arrival of brooding, tattooed William (Julien De Saint Jean) shatters his will to conform.
Their bond is instant and physical, with none of the angst that often accompanies coming out stories. They escape a cross-country run to roll among the fallen leaves, or dance to Arab pop until their bodies collide – and are dragged apart by youth workers. Ben Gharbia is a thoughtful, conflicted foil to De Saint Jean’s mesmerisingly strange, troubled performance here. He writhes like a contemporary dancer or retreats to etch out strange drawings of intertwined snakes, effortlessly suggesting a messed-up backstory that never really gets explained.
A powerfully physical romance shaded in dreamy, intense colours
But then writers Clara Bourreau and Maarten Loix are stronger on lyricism than biographical details here. There’s a beautiful recurring motif of fish frozen below the ice, Joe’s only childhood memory, and one that comes to capture both his emotionally deadened upbringing and his current trapped state. In a haunting scene, he holds a radio up to the wall of his tiny cell so the honeyed sounds of a love song can drift through to William in the next room.
Graton's soundtrack here is almost like another character. It lets Joe’s Arab heritage filter through these scenes of longing, bringing new richness to a youth detention facility that’s built to enforce the values of the white Belgian establishment. This isn’t a place for happy endings – even if it seems to offer more room for freedom and creative expression than its grimmer British equivalents. Instead, it’s a place for snatched, illicit moments of beauty – ones that Graton’s film captures to their very fullest.
In UK cinemas Dec 15.
