Enzo (Eloy Pohu) is sixteen or seventeen, a dangerous age. He’s still very much a child, but thinks he isn’t. Having a scooter and some limited amounts of freedom isn’t quite adulthood, but he is too young and too privileged to know that. He lives with his parents Marion and Paolo (Élodie Bouchez and Pierfrancesco Favino, acting in French) and his older brother in a fancy modernist house on a hillside on the French Riviera. They even have a pool. The brother is on college track and spending most of his time studying, but Enzo has left school and is working as an apprentice on a construction site. He’s not bad at it, and he really likes the work, but his parents are furious with this choice and Enzo is still a child. The question this quiet, thoughtful movie wants to know is how this little boy will grow up.
The construction crew is diverse and prone to the kind of masculine banter not suitable for younger ears, though the men make allowances for Enzo’s age and don’t tease him too much. The leader of the crew is Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi), a handsome Ukrainian in his mid-twenties who came to France with a friend to avoid being conscripted into the war. Enzo can’t understand this; he has a tendency to watch YouTube videos made by Ukrainian soldiers (by the pool as he drinks a smoothie his mom made him) and fancy this makes him an expert. This is fairly standard teenage nonsense, except of course it’s not nonsense to the teens working through their complicated, shifting, inarticulate feelings like this. Marion has adopted a wait-and-see approach to handling Enzo, but Paolo is much more verbal about his worries. Even as he knows all the relentless harping about the future is only making the present worse, Paolo cannot help himself, and the ugly family arguments ring very true to life. But as Enzo experiments with girls and hangs out with Vlad and waits for his future to figure itself out, the question is whether the arrogance of youth will turn into something much more dangerous.
The sunkissed setting, casual privilege and multilingual setting provides several surface comparisons to Call Me By Your Name, but director Robin Campillo (who co-wrote the script with Gilles Marchand and the late Laurent Cantet, who was due to direct before his passing last year) makes the more interesting choice of having the younger person’s crush not be sexual exactly. It’s much more like Enzo wants to be Vlad without appreciating what that means. For all his swagger and willingness to defy his parents by leaving school, Enzo still doesn’t know who he is or what he wants. And while Vlad likes Enzo and doesn’t mind having the kid following him around like a puppy, he is not prepared to do Enzo’s growing up for him. And of course Enzo doesn’t understand this is what he’s asking, so is prone to the sulky, dangerous outbursts that are the least delightful part of the teen years for anybody. Mr. Pohu does good work keeping the angst the right side of irritating.
The trouble is it would have been vastly more interesting if Enzo’s reckless histrionics had a more permanent outcome. On the other hand, this kid is still young and privileged enough that other people will fix his mistakes, and it would be a surprise if parents as loving as these abandoned their responsibilities. The final metaphor, which ties in very neatly to the construction theme that underpins the whole movie, is also very clever. This is a likeable little movie that parents and sons will have an interesting time watching together, and is an up-to-the-minute depiction of someone figuring themselves out.
Enzo recently played at the London Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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