Call Me By Your Pain: Campillo Gently Guides Cantet’s Swan Song
Laurent Cantet was a filmmaker consistently concerned with humans existing on the margins, those whose experiences were often invisible or unexplored in cinema. Known for extolling a ‘fabricated realism’ in his films, Cantet focused on working class realities or struggles of the disenfranchised in their inevitable intersections with proscribed restraints demanded by commerce and capitalism. Enzo was to be his latest project just prior to his death in 2024, with his long-time collaborator Robin Campillo taking over as director for a narrative in-keeping with Cantet’s explorations of identity forged or defined by economic realities and conflict. With Cantet’s keen eye towards youthful realities in the latter half of his career, their latest venture serves as a bittersweet coming out story about a privileged French teenager passionately awakened by first love.
Enzo (Eloy Pohu), is a troubled sixteen-year-old who lives with his well-heeled parents (Elodie Bouchez, Pierfrancesco Favino) in a swank neighborhood on a hill, a glistening pool in the backyard. However, he has opted to abandon his studies and instead pursue an apprenticeship as a mason. Unfortunately, his heart doesn’t seem to be in the work, and he’s escorted home from a worksite one day by his aggravated boss, who tells Enzo’s parents perhaps the boy is meant to do something else. But Enzo doubles down on his commitment, returning to work with every intention to succeed. However, as chance would have it, his tenuous relationship with older colleagues dissipates when Victor (Nathan Japy) and Vlad (Maksym Slivinsky) invite him to hang out and go clubbing after work. Both men are Ukrainian, currently deliberating whether they should return to their native country to join the war. Vlad seems reluctant, having a strained relationship with his parents, an energy which seems to bond him to Enzo. As it turns out, Enzo is attracted to Vlad, who might have reciprocal feelings.
Enzo eddies in slow-burn identity character building for its titular character, played by newcomer Eloy Pohu, who displays an impressive fluctuation as he moves from morose teen to wild behavioral chaos while navigating his swiftly growing emotional connection to his older colleague. His awareness of his privileged upbringing is a side effect of rebelling against his father’s expectations and an internalized struggle with his sexuality. Much like the parents in Call Me By Your Name (2017), Bouchez and Favino are understanding to a fault, supporting their child’s struggle to find himself but misreading opportunities for potential intervention.
Enzo’s lackluster pursuit of a working class trade seems to be the greatest concern, especially considering his older brother’s ambitions. His own artistic passions seem to have stagnated, and the script slyly suggests why. When Enzo brings schoolmate Amina (Malou Khebizi) over to his house one day, she compliments his drawing of a naked woman, who he admits was a statue. Offering to pose for him, Enzo declines her advances, stating he couldn’t bear to make another person uncomfortable as they pose for hours while he draws them. But it also suggests Enzo has been unable to explore evolving inspirational figures and tastes, forcing him to abandon his passions, pursuing meaning elsewhere. Enzo’s few moments of emotional expression via dialogue are few and far between yet effective. In a thwarted night out with Vlad, who dresses Enzo for a club he’s too young to get into, he tells his father, waiting up at home, “It was the best night of my life,” even though nothing remarkable happened. Yet, clearly, he’s experienced a sensual awakening.
As such, not much more is required before his budding fascination with Vlad takes full flight, a relationship with an automatic expiration date as both Vlad and Victor have determined they need to turn to Ukraine and enlist in the ongoing war with Russia. These heightened stakes send Enzo into a tailspin, whose behavior swiftly allows for his parents to determine what’s actually happening. Where Enzo really comes together is in the third act as Enzo’s struggle develops authentically and without sentimentality. Prone to lying as a way to create an exaggerated response, his conflicted coming out, whilst drunk and causing a scene at a celebration for his brother, sets up a myriad of catalysts which would have sparked a dramatic showdown in countless other similar narratives. But the patience and tenderness of his parents deescalate a potential explosion. Enzo, who is prone to dramatics, and eventually self-harm, embodies familiar characteristics of teenage angst, but Campillo and Cantet lay an internalized groundwork to properly build to externalized outbursts.
It’s a film which depends almost exclusively on the success of its titular character, not unlike Cantet’s penultimate project, Arthur Rambo (2021), another contemporary youth drama about a young man whose online identity is inadvertently revealed to his peers, causing havoc. But there are strands of several Cantet themes here, namely his other queer youth film Foxfire (2012) but, also class and culture inequities, such as evidenced in Heading South (2005), not to mention the backdrop of specific working environments with his early films Human Resources (1999) and Time Out (2001). And yet, Enzo also securely feels like a Robin Campillo film, suggestive of his underrated 2013 title Eastern Boys.
In a sense, we’ve seen narratives like Enzo in various iterations, but the film, like its lead character, evens out into an confident stride to match his newly discovered balance and self-reliance without compromising the integrity of reality.
Reviewed on May 14th at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival (78th edition) – Directors’ Fortnight. 102 Mins.
★★★/☆☆☆☆☆
