Here is a movie from Belgium about young queer love, with an obvious superficial resemblance to Lukas Dhont’s recent intense drama Close. But for all that this film shows an arguably refreshing and perhaps even radical refusal to problematise the central relationship, it looks pretty shallow in comparison.
Elias (Lou Goossens) is a teen boy in rural Belgium, notionally going out with Valerie (Saar Rogiers), a girl at his school. His grandpa is a farmer nearby, his dad a composer of cheesy but successful pop songs. Elias is quietly stunned when a good-looking boy of his age moves in next door, just arrived from Brussels; this is Alexander (Marius De Saeger). They become friends; Alexander is perfectly calm and candid about being gay and then they become more than friends. They have to deal with homophobic bullying at school and Elias’s discarded girlfriend has to handle her own feelings of anger and rejection.
The drama sorts itself out neatly before the closing credits and the older generation on both sides seem to be very enlightened, which is surprising, if admirable, in the case of Elias’s rural farmer grandpa. In the end there is something a little too smooth and passionless in the film – there is nothing, for example to match or even approach the great speech from Michael Stuhlbarg’s caring father to Timothée Chalamet’s heartbroken Elio in Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. Everyone knows that young love, gay and straight, is (mostly) about heartbreak and about moving on. I’m not sure that this film really understands that.
• Young Hearts is in UK cinemas from 8 August.
