If it’s gay versus queer then gay wins out in Enzo, a coming-of-age/coming-out drama of the old school, where the homosexuality is the subject under discussion, the problem to be solved, rather than window-dressing to something else.
Enzo is a 16-year-old French lad who has rejected the life that was in his stars. Currently working as a labourer, he was meant to be following a similar trajectory to his brother – university, some sort of career – but has instead dropped out and is hefting sacks about on a building site where his soft hands are picking up blisters. As we meet him, Enzo is being given a hard time by his boss, the fairly kindly Corelli, because he is, quite frankly, a bit useless. If he were being honest with himself he’d admit he’s slumming it and that working manually is at least partly his way of giving his family the finger.
But it’s only in the lunch breaks that the full extent of Enzo’s mistake becomes obvious. The guys all talk about girls, but Enzo can’t join in, because he isn’t built that way. He’s got a half girlfriend of sorts, and at one point he’ll get her to pose in her bikini with him by the family pool, so he can take a picture to show the lads. But he’s not really interested in actually consummating the relationship. In fact his eye has been caught by Vlad, a handsome Ukrainian who might soon be heading back to fight in the war against Russia, alongside his pal Miroslav, who is much keener to go back than Vlad.
What’s fascinating about Enzo as a movie is that we’re onside with Enzo as a human being, but not necessarily with his choices. Really, his life would be a lot better if he’d continued with his pursuit of art – the drawings on the wall of his room tell us that – and his decision to spend the bulk of his days in a casually homophobic, all-male milieu appears also to be an act of self-provocation. Against the backdrop of the nice bourgeois family headed by concerned parents Paolo (Pierfrancesco Favino) and Marion (Élodie Bouchez), Enzo will gradually work this fascination for Vlad into an obsession, which will eventually come to a head twice – first at a family party where he starts waving a gun about, then at the building site where he tells Vlad how he feels.
The film is directed by Robin Campillo, veteran of a series of films that tend to the queer rather than the gay – Eastern Boys, 120 BPM most obviously – but it’s billed as a Laurent Cantet Film. Cantet mostly wrote it and intended to direct it until he was struck down by terminal cancer. At which point Campillo stepped. A regular collaborator of Cantet who’s co-written or edited his films, he sticks with Cantet spiritually and practically – the tricky coming-of-ager with acting done by non-professionals is Cantet territory. Neither Eloy Pohu, who plays Enzo, nor Maksim Slivinskyi, who’s Vlad, come across as first-timers. These are rounded and consummate characters, and the two of them are fully plausible as actors.
It’s a compact, tight drama where nearly everything slots together. Shot in the south of France where the sun is always shining and Enzo’s family swimming pool looks endlessly enticing, there’s an attempt to say something about the soft, cosseted Europe that Enzo represents as compared to the other one that Vlad comes from, where the ongoing war against Russia may at some point call Vlad back home. But this is left largely simmering on the back ring.
In many ways a very familiar film, almost as if out of the 1990s rather than 30 years later, Enzo is a more subtle and complex film that at first appears. On re-examination it might even be seen as a comedy, with Enzo as the butt of the joke. Though maybe that is a bit perverse. Don’t look here for laughs.
Enzo – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
