Enzo

“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."

Peter Debruge, Variety