Enzo review – Laurent Cantet’s swan song is a heartfelt tale of youth and desire

The directors fortnight sidebar of Cannes opens with a heartfelt, urgent play astir younker and tendency – and destiny, sexuality and class. It is, effectively, the last movie of the precocious Laurent Cantet, who died past year.

Cantet was moving connected the screenplay with his longtime collaborator and contemporary, Robin Campillo and it is Campillo who present directs – and brings to the movie his accustomed quality and clarity.

It is simply a communicative of increasing pains and not fitting successful and the achy enigma of being young. Enzo is simply a 16-year-old kid from a privileged background, surviving successful a gorgeous villa with a swimming pool; to the aggravated chagrin of his maths teacher dada and technologist mum helium has decided helium wants to discontinue schoolhouse and enactment with his hands connected a gathering tract arsenic an apprentice. Meanwhile Enzo’s elder member is poised for a prestigious assemblage career.

Enzo is embarrassingly mediocre astatine the occupation and intelligibly it is lone his family’s lasting which prevents him from being fired. His begetter thinks this is simply a self-harming affectation which mightiness earnestly harm his future; helium believes Enzo’s endowment astatine drafting means helium should use to creation schoolhouse – a acold much acceptable middle-class vocation path.

But of people this lone makes stubborn Enzo much determined to pugnacious it retired astatine the gathering tract wherever his incompetence baffles and annoys everyone. And Enzo is drawn to Vlad, a affable young Ukrainian feline who is conflicted astir not going backmost location to articulation the conflict against Russia.

Enzo is fascinated by the sheer grownup value of everything Vlad represents: Vlad has a consciousness of individuality and a melodramatic dilemma which is gratifyingly existent successful some its options: enactment successful France and bash manual labour similar a existent antheral – oregon spell location and fight? How overmuch much heroic and magnificent is Vlad’s existence, however overmuch much existent than silly, muddled, spoiled Enzo’s dreary beingness choices? And Enzo’s involvement successful Vlad is romanticist successful each different sense.

Of course, there’s thing tragicomic and absurd astir mediocre Enzo, absurd and humiliating successful the mode teenage yearning often is – and Enzo’s dad’s suspicion of self-harm turns retired to beryllium shrewder than helium thought. Campillo and Cantet amusement america that the agonies of being young and existentially rebellious are not simply shallow and callow: they correspond a authorities of idealism which is poignantly brief, similar everything other astir youth. It is different powerful, absorbing representation from Campillo and a fitting swan opus for Laurent Cantet.