Enzo is rather more than an exploration of a younger boy’s discomfort along with his household’s social class. It seems, director Robin Campillo tells The Hollywood Reporter, that the French-made movie is definitely the ultimate hurrah of his long-time pal and Cannes Palme d’Or winner Laurent Cantet.
“It’s actually a movie from Laurent Cantet and by Laurent Cantet,” says Campillo, the de facto caretaker of Enzo, who first met his fellow filmmaker in 1983. “I did the job, in a method, but it surely’s actually a movie from him and I believe it’s a victory in opposition to demise that this movie exists.”
Cantet penned the script, following a 16-year-old (Eloy Pohu) who defies his bourgeois household’s expectations by beginning a masonry apprenticeship. He supposed to direct it, too — however a most cancers prognosis put a halt to what would have been Cantent’s 18th movie. He died in April 2024, and handed the baton to Campillo. “I used to be going to be in each step of constructing the movie,” the director of 2017’s BPM (Beats per Minute) explains. “The casting, the preparation, and the taking pictures, as a result of we have been afraid that [Cantet] can be too drained to speak to the cameramen, to the technicians. So I’d be like an assistant, however a really private assistant… I used to be going to edit the movie with him [too], however simply after the casting, he received sick in a short time and he died in a short time.”
“Earlier than he died, we talked collectively when he was within the hospital, and we determined, along with his spouse Isabelle and the producer, Marie-Ange Luciani, we instructed him that we’d be very happy to complete the movie for him. And he was, I believe, very touched by that.”
Enzo, as Campillo describes it, will not be an atypical story of a brooding teenager, however an evaluation of the intensive pressures positioned on the shoulders of younger individuals in an more and more chaotic world. “You must select in a short time what you’re going to do in your life,” he says. “And it’s a multitude — Ukraine, Gaza, all this violence, the elections in [the U.S.]. We’re in a really troublesome second… And we ask younger individuals to [know exactly] what they wish to do, who they wish to be. However we have now a messy world to advertise and promise to them.”
Whereas Cantet’s movie isn’t a few insurgent son, Enzo does shock his dad and mom by falling in love with an older Ukrainian man on the constructing web site he works at. “I believe for Laurent, there was a factor that he preferred about younger individuals — they’re sexually fluid. Enzo… It’s not as a result of he finds [Vlad] attractive, it’s as a result of he’s a man who needs to get out of his family. He doesn’t wish to keep in his very bourgeois make-believe state of affairs. He needs to go backstage to see the backstage. So, this love story is linked to his will to confront actuality.”
Provides Campillo: “I believe Cannes is the correct place [for Enzo]. The viewers might be loads of [Cantet’s] pals, lots of people that he’s labored with within the cinema business. It’s not a darkish movie, it’s luminous. Will probably be like a feast and, I believe, one thing very joyful.”