‘Enzo’ director Robin Campillo on love, loss and teenage growing pains
The long-time collaborator of Laurent Cantet fulfils the late director’s vision with this film set over the course of a hot summer in France.
Enzo is a coming-of-age story that unfolds over the course of an intensely hot summer in the south of France and to the soundtrack of cicadas singing in dry grass (writes Josefina Nagler Gómez). This is the final movie from French director Laurent Cantet, who passed away before its realisation. It fell to friend and long-time collaborator Robin Campillo to fulfil Cantet’s vision. Enzo (Eloy Pohu), a 16-year-old boy from a bourgeois family, has struggled in school and turns to a career in construction. While working on a building site, he becomes enamoured with Vlad, a young Ukrainian man longing for a clean slate and some distance between himself and the war at home. Here, Campillo tells us about the uniqueness of our teenage years, romance compared to love and working on the film alongside Cantet in his final days.
Is ‘Enzo’ a love story?
I don’t believe in love, I believe in romance. The movie concerns itself with lots of loves: for self, country, family, love and romance. Vlad and Enzo form a deep love but the romance is unrequited. Vlad is moved by Enzo’s understanding of him as a hero but ultimately their relationship is formed and challenged by the infatuation of the adolescent mind.
Why do our teenage years provide rich stories for cinema?
We can all relate to a teenage crisis, thinking that it comes from the outside when it actually comes from within. We begin to understand that the order of the world is more fragile than we thought. In a way, anything is possible and all the doors are open to you but the world you thought of as legitimate and grown up is more of a fantasy. There’s something terrifying in its wide-open possibility.
Many of the actors in ‘Enzo’ are first-timers. How did you approach casting?
Introducing up-and-comers is a part of Laurent’s legacy and it was important to both of us to give space to new talent. We were searching for actors who did not yet know that they were actors. We saw great potential in Maksym Slivinskyi (Vlad) and Eloy Pohu (Enzo), and they are indeed both very good.
Do you think of this movie as a ‘swan song?’
Cantet and I shared a friendship of 43 years, which started at school. We discovered films and filmmaking together. In the end, that was what united us – we were discussing Enzo up until the last day of his life. This film is what prevented us both from falling apart. It was not bravery that made me finish Enzo – rather, it was the only thing that I could do, the only way to honour the friendship. So, yes, it is a swan song.
