He Hates The Phrase ‘boys Will Be Boys. So His Oscarnominated Movie Fights Back

© (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times) Intimacy is from Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter Lucas Dont. (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

Two years ago, the award-winning Belgian director Lucas Dont traveled by train between the Flemish cities of Antwerp and Ghent. Despite wearing headphones, the director noticed the compelling presence of the man sitting next to him.

"When I look at him, I see this young angel - there's no other way to describe him - talking to his friends, very expressive, with bright eyes," Dont told The Times in a recent interview in West Hollywood. "I thought, 'I'm going to regret it if I don't talk to him.'

This beautiful teenager, Eden Dambrin, finally stars in Dont's second feature film, Close, which opens on Friday. "I'm in ballet school," Dubrin said via video link. "I never thought I would become an actor or be interested in films."

The harrowing drama, nominated for an International Film Academy Award, tells the story of this special moment between childhood and adolescence from the perspective of two 13-year-old boys, whose friendship is eroded by society's expectations of masculinity.

For Dont, it began with the realization that images of men struggling with intimacy have long since flooded our screens and become the only acceptable way to communicate with one another. Seeing men meet in platonic affection remains much rarer.

The writer-director's desire to redefine masculinity in film was inspired by a 2011 book by American psychologist Niobe Way, who observed a group of 150 boys between the ages of 13 and 18 and sought their friendship over time.

"At 13 years old, these boys are talking to each other in the most loving, gentle, beautiful way," Donte said. "It's an expression of love, and they dare to use the word openly."

But as the young men reached their teenage years, the answers to Way's questions changed dramatically. Due to the increasing norms and pressures to be masculine, they saw emotion as a weakness and feared being perceived as a woman, often at the expense of true attachment. At this age, the suicide rate for men is four times higher than for women.

"I made a strong bond with these young people on the site, even though I didn't know them, because at that time in my life I also started to fear intimacy with other young people. I started to grow again," said Donte. "I'm really sorry now."

When he met Dubrin on that train ride, Dont had almost finished writing Intimacy and was visiting various schools in Brussels to actively seek non-professionals to star in the film. On one of those scouting visits, I didn't see Gustav De Waele, another guy in the equation, doing it with his acting class.

© (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times) Lucas Dont. (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

However, don't throw any of them away right away. The two attended a one-day workshop with a group of 30 other boys, where they played games and interacted with each other to test their chemistry. Dambrin and De Waele quickly became friends.

Dont describes their instant camaraderie with the French proverb: “Because he was; because it was me" ("Because it was him; because it was me"), which describes the inexplicable reason why some relationships are easy from the start.

At the final stage of the casting process, the director shared the script with them so they knew what the story was about before they signed on. "It's important to me that it's not just us who get picked, but them too," Dont added.

With everyone on board, Daunt and her two rookie actors began six months of rehearsals from January to July 2021. Since neither of them had been in front of the camera in a professional setting, Daunt had to prepare them before moving forward. .

But rehearsal didn't mean going back to specific scenes. Instead, they spent time with him, together, and with the grown-up actors who played their parents. Those gatherings, Dont recalls, often involved cooking pancakes for hungry teenagers.

"Sometimes when we were making the pancake batter I would think, 'Why do you think Remy is so emotional?' They become detectives trying to find out why their characters are the way they are," Dont said. They make up their characters.

At the beginning of this training, Dont brought a camera to film their conversation, so that the boys understand that even with the camera on, they don't have to act artificially. He also encouraged her to forget the dialogue on the page and reinterpret it in her own words.

Don't think that this is the key to naturalistic representations. Listening to the boys' full emotional intelligence, on the other hand, influenced the outcome of the final script.

"I think we can learn a lot from listening to 13-year-olds because they're still very attached to their hearts," Donte said. "They don't censor or adjust what society wants to say, that's why they say they're so radical."

Dubrin plays Leo, a boy from a Flemish province who begins to drift apart from his best friend (De Waele) after some of his classmates suggest that they should be a gay couple due to the physical and emotional closeness of their bond.

"When we discussed it, I always said, 'I don't care about the sexuality of these characters,'" Daunt recalls. "They can be anyone, because that's not really the point."

I don't think society is so used to seeing images of intimate relationships between young men that people are forced to immediately interpret them as sex.

"When you see two girls playing together and hugging, you think it's okay," Dambrin added. "But if you see two boys, do they have to be a couple?"

Leo turns his back on Remy, outside judgments poison their bond and joins the hockey team to conform to gender stereotypes. "He's trying to find his manhood with tough guys," Dambrin said. "He didn't want to be Remy's friend anymore, but he was afraid of feeling like his best friend."

Don't choose ice hockey as Leo's sport because of the uniform, which seemed like armor, a mask, and everything that prevents physical contact and hides the sadness the protagonist is experiencing. To a manager, a hockey team is like a flock of birds, always moving in the same direction.

"Leo wants to fly in the same direction as the others," Donte said. "Perhaps it is someone who wants to be part of many and not just one, who wants to do this dance, which is beautiful but disturbs the other birds."

Dont talks about growing up in the Flemish countryside, where he grew up surrounded by fields of flowers. For him, the image of two boys running through these colorful landscapes is an ode to the freedom and innocence of childhood, and the flowers themselves are a metaphor for the fragility of life.

Other male characters in Intimacy also challenge the equation of masculinity with the suppression of emotions: older brother Leo responds to younger brother Leo's pain with physical comfort; Remy's father cries at the table and cannot hide his sadness.

Dubrin's father showed the same sincerity when he first saw Intimacy: "When my dad saw it at the Cannes Film Festival, he cried, which is very rare because he doesn't cry a lot," Dubrin said. "It really moved me."

Given Close's positive international reception, Dont cited an English expression often used to justify toxic masculinity.

"I hate the saying 'boys will be boys,'" Dont said. “It shows a complete disbelief in men and their tenderness. We apologize for the worst, but most people don't want to do the worst. They simply live in a society that doesn't think they can do anything else.

This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

Marie Antoinette won the costume design award: Oscar 2007