“Enzo” begins and ends with an unusual screen credit. It reads: “A film by Laurent Cantet” and then ”Directed by Robin Campillo”(in French, of course). Cantet died in April 2024, too diminished by cancer to direct what turned out to be his final feature — a slight yet insightful drama about an agitated 16-year-old French boy butting his head against the sheltered upbringing that feels more alien with each passing day. Ergo, longtime collaborator Campillo stepped in to realize Cantet’s vision.
The result beautifully melds the two filmmakers’ sensibilities — one straight (Cantet), the other gay (Campillo) — in a blurring of the lines that renders all the more intriguing the ambiguous sexual attraction between 16-year-old Enzo (Eloy Pohu) and Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi), the 20-something Ukrainian laborer on whom he fixates. “Enzo” simmers with homoerotic tension, and yet, the title character’s crush never develops enough to call it a “gay movie” outright. There’s no defiling of peaches or precocious sexual experimentation between the roughly decade-apart duo, though the ambiguous subtext proves infinitely more fascinating, leaving everyone who sees it with a different interpretation.
“Enzo” represents a poignant opening-night selection for the Directors’ Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival all the same, especially in light of Cantet’s Palme d’Or win for “The Class” in 2008. “Enzo” is far from typical, as either a coming-out or a coming-of-age story. Featuring newcomer Eloy Pohu in the title role, the understated film focuses on a teen’s clumsy and occasionally contradictory struggle to define himself apart from the relatively privileged life his doctor father (Pierfrancesco Favino) and nurse mom (Élodie Bouchez) have given him.
While his older brother prepares for university, Enzo decides he’s had enough of academia. The young man wants to work with his hands. Judging by the untended blisters on his knuckles and palms, however, Enzo doesn’t show much aptitude for it — to the extent that his supervisor drives the boy home one day to speak with his parents, surprised to discover that Enzo lives in a posh home with ocean views and a private pool.
Cantet is best known to international audiences for “The Class,” which marked the clearest expression of his career-long fascination with race, class and various obstacles certain adolescents face to finding their path in French society, where opportunity abounds but an embarrassment of choice can sometimes feel crippling. It’s a common theme in Cantet’s films to observe adolescents battling against their own best interests, and in that regard, “Enzo” more closely resembles his barely seen 2017 drama “The Workshop.”
Where audiences less charitable than Cantet might see his characters as unexceptional and perhaps even lost causes, this humanistic chronicler of modern life cared so deeply about these fictional souls that we can’t help feeling invested in their fates (rendered all the more real by Cantet’s preference for casting nonprofessionals). In a sense, the dominant feeling one gets from watching “Enzo” is that of concern, shared by the boy’s father, who respects his son’s desire to chart his own course, even as he feels insulted by how violently Enzo rejects their success.
What exactly provokes this turmoil in Enzo? That’s the mystery at the heart of the movie, and one that neither Campillo nor Cantet seem particularly motivated to answer. Instead, they leave the analysis up to us. Enzo’s hardly unique in rebelling against his upbringing. Practically all adolescents do that to some extent, though Enzo lacks an appropriate role model to show him an alternative.
The movie opens on the construction site where the lad has difficulty keeping up with what appear to be rather modest responsibilities, revealing a lack of commitment on his part. And yet, he shows a certain camaraderie with the crew, latching on to Vlad in particular. The cocky Ukrainian is constantly boasting of his conquests with women, which intrigues Enzo, who has a girlfriend of his own. Through Vlad, Enzo discovers an unexpected attraction, intensified by the political reality that Vlad escaped back home.
It impresses Enzo that such a macho figure as this can admit to being afraid of war, which awakens in the boy a very real if slightly unfocused frustration — toward others’ apathy, his own comfort or the undeniable yearnings within himself. Take your pick. Beyond Pohu’s furrowed brow, there’s little to indicate what Enzo is feeling. Still, there’s something universal and incredibly timely in this aspect of his fight, as young people all over the world are grappling with the moral dimensions of conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Syria, while their parents and peers don’t necessarily share their passion.
“Enzo” reflects how a rebel without a cause finds something to care about, if you will. In Enzo’s case, his engagement is mixed up with an infatuation he’s uncertain how to process, which is partly explained by a phone call every bit as moving as the one that closes “Call Me by Your Name.” Enzo may not be so bright in scholastic terms, but he’s far more sensitive than his family seems to realize, and there’s a certain irony to the way this movie asks us to intellectualize someone operating on instinct, stumbling toward a better understanding of himself.
