A younger boy comes of age after his father’s sudden loss of life in Christophe Honoré’s “Winter Boy.” A bleak portrait of grief, the movie might earn factors for crafting an empathetic, subjective portrayal of 1 boy’s emotional spiral. Yet, the movie additionally makes a number of odd formal and aesthetic decisions that, in the end, make Honoré’s movie really feel extra hackneyed than resonant. The strangest of which is the choice to permit Lucas (Paul Kircher), an overtly homosexual 17-year-old, to immediately tackle the digital camera, explaining and contextualizing his emotions to an unseen viewers. It’s a proper alternative that, maybe, permits Honoré to map Lucas’s inside, nevertheless it additionally comes throughout as cliched, decreasing what’s in any other case a subdued movie to overt melodrama.
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Without these interludes, nevertheless, “Winter Boy” may’ve been an affecting reflection on grief. The movie begins with Lucas at a boarding faculty earlier than he’s ultimately known as again residence after his father’s premature loss of life. There he encounters his despondent mom, Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), and his distant brother Quentin (Vincent Lacoste) as they try to kind by means of their feelings. The scenes with your complete household coming collectively really feel probably the most lived-in. Eventually, Lucas finally ends up accompanying Quentin to Paris, having a sequence of sexual encounters whereas additionally rising nearer to Quentin’s older roommate Lilio (Erwan Kepoe Falé).
Kircher, specifically, proves to be one thing of a revelation. His wanderings all through London and his emotionally distant hook-ups communicate volumes to the turmoil that he’s barring. His face conveys the ache of a fracturing household, making it all of the more unusual when he interrupts these contemplative scenes with a voice-over. His relationship with Lilio additionally turns into more and more sophisticated, as he each acts as one thing of a father determine to the wayward Lucas, but in addition a attainable lover.
By casting himself as the daddy, Honoré hints on the metafictional high quality of the story (Honoré’s father died when he was the identical age as Lucas). Yet the movie doesn’t actually dwell on the father-son relationship, solely briefly hinting at Lucas’s life earlier than his loss of life. This is a movie nearly fully attuned to 1 particular person’s wrestle. Despite having Binoche, her character is sidelined for a lot of the movie, solely actually offering quick bookends.
Yet, such singular subjectivity can also be refreshing. Lucas’s sexual identification is handled much less as a website for dramatic curiosity than only a reality about himself. While he regularly makes poor selections about his lovers, “Winter Boy” by no means judges these selections, exhibiting them as a part of a pure means of grief. In some methods, his identification is absolutely shaped; in others, he’s nonetheless making an attempt to determine the way to current himself. Further, the movie happens in the course of the pandemic, though it’s extra ingrained within the characters’ on a regular basis lives than explicitly about COVID.
Somewhere hidden on this movie is a extra nuanced exploration of grief, but Honoré appears a bit too keen on completely unpacking Lucas, leaving little to the creativeness about how and why he’s making these decisions. It’s odd to have the principle character primarily psychoanalyze his life because it performs out in entrance of us. This is additional mirrored by Yoshihiro Hanno’s overly sentimental piano rating, which harps on the melodrama a bit too incessantly.
Even with these affectations, “Winter Boy” remains to be extremely centered, feeling extra like a private excavation of 1’s personal childhood than what may’ve been a generic exploration of the cycles of grief. But in digging up what appears to be his personal private historical past, Honoré doesn’t belief the viewers absolutely to fill in these silences. [C+]