Enzo: French coming-of-ager is a poignant farewell from director Laurent Cantet

Unusually, the opening titles introduce Enzo as “a film by Laurent Cantet” before adding that it’s “directed by Robin Campillo”. The bittersweet backstory to this split credit is that Enzo was to be the last film directed by Cantet – the Frenchman behind Human Resources (1999), Time Out (2001) and Palme d’Or winner The Class (2008) – before his untimely death from cancer in 2024. When Cantet’s deteriorating health made that an impossibility, his longtime writing partner Campillo stepped in.

What has emerged from this unintended delegation isn’t a hasty or compromised salvage job, however, but a genuine and empathetic collaboration, bearing the hallmarks of both filmmakers: the sturdy, fine-grained humanism and penetrating class consciousness of Cantet’s work, certainly, but also the tingling sensual abandon and overtly queer perspective present in Campillo’s own directorial work, including Eastern Boys (2013) and 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017). That’s an asset in a film that superficially falls into the well-worn queer coming-of-age genre, as Enzo details the inchoate confusion of a first gay crush – though it’s a rite of passage knotted with the social, economic and political complexities that were Cantet’s stock in trade. The 16-year-old title character (played by promising, puppyish first-timer Eloy Pohu) has only a limited grasp of these, though he understands enough to feel confined by them. The good-looking, well-brought-up younger son of high-flying parents – his mum (Élodie Bouchez) is an engineer, his dad (Pierfrancesco Favino) a maths professor – he shows typically adolescent resistance to their bourgeois values and expectations of him, though he’s given only limited thought to what life might look like beyond the family’s chic modernist mansion in suburban Marseilles.

Refusing to follow his older brother into academia, he takes a summer masonry apprenticeship on a rough-and-tumble building site, surrounded by men older, tougher and significantly poorer than he – a rebellion that reeks of inadvertent class tourism. He perhaps underestimates the practical skills required, while the site foreman is quick to ascertain that Enzo has no great aptitude for bricklaying. This is in line with Enzo’s insistence that he has neither gifts nor ambitions, though a number of striking sketches in his bedroom point to artistic talent that might be better nurtured through studies. The apprenticeship does, however, introduce him to Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi), a resilient, good-natured and startlingly beautiful Ukrainian labourer dodging the war back home. Despite a ten-year age gap, Vlad and fellow Ukrainian exile Miroslav (Vladislav Holyk) are quick to welcome the teen into their social circle: drinking and clubbing in Marseille’s working-class fringes, Enzo finally feels a sense of laddish belonging. But while he and Vlad both have ostensible girlfriends, a mutual attraction between them is both clear and hard to articulate.

Though Enzo gives us hormones and impulses loosened in the midsummer heat – as in Campillo’s last feature Red Island (2023), cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie shoots with a crisp, sunburnt clarity – it’s not after the saturated, obsessive romanticism of Call Me by Your Name. (It does, however, seem to be in pointed dialogue with Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 film, down to a markedly similar final shot.) Homoeroticism here is chiefly felt in Enzo’s naive but searching gaze, shaping Vlad as object of nervous desire and alpha model of masculinity: does he want him, or does he just want to be him? Vlad, meanwhile, runs hot and cold in response. Perhaps Enzo’s transparent yearning aggravates the older man’s unresolved sense of his identity, though the underage boy is hardly the right outlet for any kind of experimentation – while the war in Ukraine, an urgent if somewhat awkwardly shoehorned plot point, gives him more pressing matters to consider.

Enzo, then, is a film of transitional frustrations and precipices, none brought to a point of critical change or revelation – a portrait of emotionally glitchy, tetchy adolescence, certainly, but also a reminder that not everything clicks into place in adulthood. It feels an apt story to have finally been directed by two men, their respective points of view often gracefully overlapping, before diverging in restless and fruitful ways. For Cantet, it’s a poignant and suitably untidy farewell: a study both of individual hearts and wider society in flux.

► Enzo  is in UK cinemas 5 June.