Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Robin Campillo
Starring: Eloy Pohu, Maksym Slivinskyi, Pierfrancesco Favino, Élodie Bouchez, Vladislav Holyk
Look, as someone who likes narrative and believes that the science of stories is interesting and important (why we have them, what they tell us, etc) I actually find the whole Joseph Campbell "monomyth" stuff fun. Especially when you dig down into the deeper anthropological patterns that the pop theory predicates upon. To wit, the two fathers model: wherein the archetypal hero must move beyond the biological dad (who Campbell positions as "too close" to the son, offering a love and safety which hinders actualisation) towards a mentor father who will fully educate the hero in the ways of the wider world, enabling the boy to become a man. If you're po-faced, there are manifest issues to be found with the hypothesis as a whole: the wilful ignorance of global cultural contexts, the reductive essentialism, the way what was initially descriptive became prescriptive; Jor-El/Jonathan Kent, Uncle Ben/Norman Osborne, everything in Star Wars. Yet, the examples cited are from our most populist mythos: on some level we believe in and perpetuate this stuff. What intrigues is that, overlooking a few contrived instances, the two fathers paradigm is a masculine psychology which may help elucidate the boyish requirement for validation and mentorship. My nascent observations of the so-called manosphere leave me nonplussed. Seriously, is this it? Angry men shouting at other men about cars and being broke/not broke? This is what everyone is up in arms about? Baby stuff. I'm embarrassed for not only the idiot marks who are taken in by this utter tripe but for media which has given this shamefully adolescent bluster a platform. Surely there are more interesting ways to explore burgeoning manhood?
Robin Campillo's (co-written with Laurent Cantet and Gilles Marchand) Enzo opens within the explicitly masculine space of a building site: an arena of brawn, specific skill, muscle and testosterone. Men bond, competitively decry poor effort, and pass around phones to show pictures of girlfriends back home... All in the first five minutes or so! There is an exception to the blokey proficiency, however, in central character Enzo (Eloy Pohu), a teen who frankly sticks out like a thumb hit by a wayward hammer (which he probably did to himself as he's so hopeless). Baby faced and awkward, Enzo flinches when, in built up fury, his foreman kicks down a wall which he has haphazardly laid. His slightly older (but the years between late teens and early twenties may as well be decades) colleagues seem embarrassed for him.
Taking pity on the boy, his boss drives Enzo home, with a view to disabusing his parents regarding their son's employment. Since we're such snobs, Enzo's home isn't what we might expect for the presumed socio-economic background of a soft kid who works at the lowest rung of construction. The property is a halcyon vision of bourgeois France; a designer house overlooking lush countryside, with art and illustrations adoring the walls of tastefully cluttered open plan space, presided over by liberal and good-looking parents (Pierfrancesco Favino and Élodie Bouchez) who wear the sort of linen which affects casual but is in actuality prohibitively expensive (think Brunello Cucinelli). Turns out that his parents, charming to a thé, are equally mystified as to why their bright and sensitive teen son is hell-bent on being a (terrible) brickie. It's a case of bof and the boss leaves, to put up with Enzo tomorrow. And so begins a literal bildungsroman...
Enzo's class theme is a subtle but insistent reminder of social systems. However, what the film is more interested in exploring is the wayward confusion of Enzo himself, and his childish yet recognisable search for meaning. The narrative soon posits a reason for Enzo's stubborn dedication to the ill-fitting machismo of the building site with all its inherent hard work: Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi), a pulchritudinous Ukrainian refugee who shares Enzo's shift. The teen develops a crush on the older man, although from the off, Enzo is inconclusive about the titular character's affection for this Slavic hunk, as puzzled perhaps as the protagonist himself is as to whether it is sexual in nature or just an immature veneration.
Enzo's arguments to his parents regarding his choice of work allude to a yearning for authenticity, for a proletarian reality far removed from the apéro-hosting and diving weekends of his family life: a gap year whim. The film posits Enzo's pseudo-romantic cravings for blue collar realism as the tangled and patronising idealism that it is (for a start, his parents are kind, patient and loving, and, let's face it, aspirational to the sort of audience which are going to seek this out), suggesting that brute with cheekbones Vlad, a Ukrainian soldier who has seen action, is a projected epitome of Enzo's fantasies.
What follows is a highly enjoyable cringe-drama of Enzo attempting to infiltrate Vlad's life, efforts which are accidentally facilitated by the older man's essential warmth and kindness towards the kid, even when Enzo's adances do get a bit more gay. I loved this film's refusal to let any of its characters look like anything less than decent human beings (because, to hark back to the manosphere, I think people are better and nicer than we're led to believe). Enzo Facebook stalks Vlad, inappropriately marvels to his deeply unglamourous tales of war, and follows him to clubs (where Vlad has his pick of the women, etc, which serves to further glorify him to Enzo). All the while friction continues at home, where Enzo alienates himself from his family with his father poignantly sensing the rejection (perhaps Papa has a copy of 'Le Héros aux mille et un visages' on those well stacked shelves...) and attempts a sexual relationship with a female schoolmate (he goes down on her in the family swimming pool which, to me, is resolutely un-gay; another indication of his chaotic hero transference towards Vlad).
From La Piscine onwards, the swimming pool is a semiotic French Cinema staple of psycho-sexuality, and here it is duly a site of aquatic reflection for Enzo: suspended in thick water, near naked, when we swim we are most aware of our physicality, after all. The camera watches as Enzo ploughs the narrow lengths of the pool, his mind silently churning with notions of masculinity and his place within it. This is, after all, the tragedy of kids: until the tide takes them out, they have no idea of the oceans beyond the little pond that they bathe temporarily within. "You're a spoiled kid fooling himself," his father tells Enzo; restrained words following the mother of all final act social embarrassments, which, appropriately, centre on the resonant signifier of the swimming pool. Some may find the lack of hyperbole and its non-committal sadness slightly underwhelming, but I cherished Enzo for its thoughtful and ambivalent probing of adolescent masculinity.
Enzo is in UK/ROI cinemas from June 5th.
