Stop me if this sounds familiar – across a beautiful European summer, a teenage boy on the cusp of manhood falls for a strong and strapping older guy with a doomed crush that ends with a long unbroken take of that boy’s face reacting to a fateful final phone call. Yes, Robin Campillo’s Enzo often feels like a French knockoff of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name and, unfortunately, the comparisons do not flatter Campillo’s film. As you’d expect from the director of Red Island, Enzo looks beautiful and has some decent performances, but its mostly charmless lead and predictable plotting makes for a muted emotional impact.
Enzo (Eloy Pohu) is a 16-year-old from a decently well-off academic middle class family in the sun-soaked south of France, living in a fabulous house that would definitely be beyond his parents’ paygrades (just one of a few touches here that smack of a lack of attention to detail). Rebelling against his own comfort, as boys his age do, Enzo has rejected the academic path his older brother has taken and decided, mostly initially out of spite, to drop out of school and join a rugged, working-class construction crew, at which he is roughly as bad as he was at academia.
What starts as a pointless ‘up yours’ to his overbearing dad Paolo (Pierfrancesco Favino) becomes Enzo’s genuine calling when he starts falling for 25-year-old Vlad (Maksym Slivinskiy), a Ukrainian on the crew torn between his new, comfortable life in France and the call of duty to go home and fight. Under Vlad’s guidance, Enzo starts getting much better at his construction gig, while pulling away even further from his worried but impatient family, though it’s all complicated when Vlad spots Enzo’s attraction to him and, kindly but sternly, sets out his boundaries.
It’s all solidly acted, especially by Slivinskiy, who is compelling and charismatic as one of the few characters in the film whose stakes feel affectingly real. He’s a mercurial figure, switching between easygoing hunk and fatalistic mentor as easily as he hops between French and Ukrainian – the shared French of the crew breaking up into a chorus of regional languages as they split off into smaller teams is one of the better observations here. It should be easier to care about Enzo and Vlad as a pair – romantic or no – given how fun Vlad is but, for a film called Enzo, you never really want to hang out with Enzo.
This isn’t really Pohu’s fault – he’s as convincing as he can be in the role – but Enzo just sucks. Of course, every 16-year-old boy is pretty awful, but Campillo, working from the final script from the sadly departed Laurent Cantet, can’t keep Enzo from feeling like a generic ‘snotty movie teenager’. What could be a fully realised character instead feels like a collection of familiar tropes, from an unpursued artistic talent to a girlfriend who barely matters – it very often feels like this would be a more interesting story from Vlad’s point of view; a vulnerable migrant suddenly the target of a teenage obsession.
At least it all looks gorgeous. Campillo is one the best working directors at bringing the warmth of summer to the screen and the colours here, whether it’s the pink-orange of a sunrise or the dazzling blue of the Mediterranean, are so sumptuous you want to just sink into them forever. Even here, though, the shadow of Call Me By Your Name looms – Guadagnino’s film was hardly a slouch in the decadent summer colours department – and there just isn’t enough to Enzo for Enzo and Vlad to feel like they’re anything other than playing second fiddle to Elio and Oliver.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 