Enzo is much more than an exploration of a young boy’s discomfort with his family’s social class. It turns out, director Robin Campillo tells The Hollywood Reporter, that the French-made film is actually the final hurrah of his long-time friend and Cannes Palme d’Or winner Laurent Cantet.
“It’s really a film from Laurent Cantet and by Laurent Cantet,” says Campillo, the de facto caretaker of Enzo, who first met his fellow filmmaker in 1983. “I did the job, in a way, but it’s really a film from him and I think it’s a victory against death that this film exists.”
Cantet penned the script, following a 16-year-old (Eloy Pohu) who defies his bourgeois family’s expectations by starting a masonry apprenticeship. He intended to direct it, too — but a cancer diagnosis put a halt to what would have been Cantent’s 18th film. He died in April 2024, and passed the baton to Campillo. “I was going to be in every step of making the film,” the director of 2017’s BPM (Beats per Minute) explains. “The casting, the preparation, and the shooting, because we were afraid that [Cantet] would be too tired to talk to the cameramen, to the technicians. So I would be like an assistant, but a very personal assistant… I was going to edit the film with him [too], but just after the casting, he got sick very quickly and he died very quickly.”
“Before he died, we talked together when he was in the hospital, and we decided, with his wife Isabelle and the producer, Marie-Ange Luciani, we told him that we would be very pleased to finish the film for him. And he was, I think, very touched by that.”
Enzo, as Campillo describes it, is not an ordinary tale of a brooding teenager, but an analysis of the extensive pressures placed on the shoulders of young people in an increasingly chaotic world. “You have to choose very quickly what you are going to do in your life,” he says. “And it’s a mess — Ukraine, Gaza, all this violence, the elections in [the U.S.]. We are in a very difficult moment… And we ask young people to [know exactly] what they want to do, who they want to be. But we have a messy world to promote and promise to them.”
While Cantet’s film isn’t about a rebel son, Enzo does shock his parents by falling in love with an older Ukrainian man on the building site he works at. “I think for Laurent, there was a thing that he liked about young people — they are sexually fluid. Enzo… It’s not because he finds [Vlad] sexy, it’s because he’s a guy who wants to get out of his own family. He doesn’t want to stay in his very bourgeois make-believe situation. He wants to go behind the curtain to see the backstage. So, this love story is connected to his will to confront reality.”
Adds Campillo: “I think Cannes is the right place [for Enzo]. The audience will be a lot of [Cantet’s] friends, a lot of people that he’s worked with in the cinema industry. It’s not a dark film, it’s luminous. It will be like a feast and, I think, something very joyful.”