Enzo opens with a heartbreaking credit: it’s a film by Laurent Cantet but directed by Robin Campillo. Cantet, the French filmmaker who won the Palme d’Or for The Class, was set to direct Enzo from a script he co-wrote with Campillo and Gilles Marchand. However, in April 2024, two months before production, Cantet died of cancer. His close collaborator, Campillo, took over: the arrangement was agreed when Cantet was in hospital, unsure how much longer he had left.

Campillo, then, is emotional when speaking to Dazed in a Holborn office. “It’s like I created a temple for Laurent,” says the 63-year-old French director. “Making the film was like summoning spirits. I didn’t try to imitate Laurent’s style. I directed the film like how I would do it.” Campillo names a key example: he is gay, whereas Cantet was straight. “When I was young, it wasn’t easy being gay. The possibility of touching another guy felt unthinkable. I wanted Enzo to think it’s a miracle he could touch a guy he desires.”

16-year-old Enzo (Eloy Pohu) is introduced as a clumsy construction site worker who struggles with a shovel. Secretly, Enzo is a rich kid. After handling cement under the punishing sun, he returns to his extravagant home in the coastal town of La Ciotat where he bickers with his bourgeois parents, Paolo (Pierfrancesco Favino) and Marion (Élodie Bouchez), who wish to send him to a private school in Marseille.

Further tensions arise when Enzo develops a crush on Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi), a Ukrainian co-worker in his 20s who might be needed for the war with Russia. Swapping photos of their girlfriends, Enzo and Vlad bond over laddish behaviour and head out to nightclubs ostensibly to flirt with women. However, there’s also the intimacy of their late-night meals in Vlad’s home, or how Vlad dresses Enzo up before a night out (after undressing him first, of course).

“With Laurent, we absolutely agreed on what Enzo was saying or doing,” says Campillo. “But we didn’t have the same interpretation. For Laurent, Enzo was a young guy of his generation whose desire is very fluid, and that’s not a problem. The issue for the parents, especially the father, is that Enzo’s a minor.” However, Campillo views Enzo as more closeted. “When Enzo is with his girlfriend, she has to touch his hands and kiss him. He doesn’t give anything back naturally.”

On paper, Enzo may seem more suited to Campillo than Cantet. As a director, Campillo specialises in charged coming-of-agers like 120 BPM and Red Island. As a screenwriter, though, Campillo co-wrote several of Cantet’s films, including The Class, Heading South, and Time Out (which is, bizarrely, being remade by Adam Sandler for 2027). Campillo was in fact brought on by Cantet to rewrite Enzo after dissatisfaction with early drafts.

Enzo, played by a first-time actor with a natural blankness, is inscrutable throughout the story, even during his monologues and tearful breakdowns. After watching the film, my mind started percolating: is Enzo even gay? Could his flirtations with Vlad be merely a protest against his conservative parents and, by chasing after a seemingly straight, older man, is he ensuring that no actual romantic relationship will materialise?

Campillo had similar questions himself. “Enzo tells the father, ‘He’s my lover. He fucks me.’ It’s a declaration of independence. It could be that Enzo is love with Vlad because he’s a worker from Ukraine, a country at war. But there’s also a masculine way that he desires him. He draws topless soldiers, which is a little bit weird.”

The topic sends Campillo into a number of tangents. One is about the juxtaposition of Vlad and Paolo. “People of my generation – I don’t agree with them! – think Paolo is such a good father who listens. But young people think he’s a pervert and a Peeping Tom. For me, the father is horrible.” In the writing, Campillo and Cantet switched Paolo and Marion’s characters. “Now, the mother works and has distance from the family. The father does the laundry and makes dinner. He uses that feminine role to get into his child’s bedroom to be there all the time.”

When we remember our first times, like our first kiss, the suspense is incredible

Another tangent involves a Q&A in France where an angry woman criticised Campillo for Vlad showing off a video of his girlfriend without her consent “I told her that I didn’t do it – the character did it.” Campillo thinks about this moment some more, which leads to a 20-minute analysis of a single gesture in Enzo. “Just before Vlad shows Enzo the video, he says, ‘Your mother is going to say I showed you porn.’ He’s aware he’s crossing boundaries. There’s a sentence written by Laurent that I love – when Vlad says: ‘We stop now.’”

Campillo is referring to a moment two-thirds into Enzo when, in the middle of the night, Enzo walks across to Vlad’s bed and places his hand on the older man’s naked chest. “The line is ‘we stop now’, not ‘you stop now’,” Campillo explains. “Vlad knows he’s created something. He’s responsible.” 

Campillo recalls Marchant visiting the set that day. In the first few takes, Enzo’s fingers wandered towards Vlad’s groin. Campillo describes it as “a hand that descends into the sex”. Marchant suggested that Enzo’s hands could be less direct, whereas Vlad could be stronger with his grip. Thus, in the final cut, Enzo only touches Vlad’s chest, which prompts the latter resolutely taking his hand away.

“Vlad finds a way to be firm and gentle at the same time,” says Campillo. “The father is unable to do that. Vlad decides that this child’s body doesn’t belong to him, and so he says, ‘I will take you home. I can’t have you in my house at night.’ It’s very simple but direct. I love that. He doesn’t know if he consciously or unconsciously let this teenager desire him. For me, it’s so beautiful to see this ambiguity, and so realistic. It happens a lot, this kind of unconscious seduction.”

Although the conversation has overrun our allotted time, Campillo expounds even further on the significance of gesture. “When we remember our first times, like our first kiss, the suspense is incredible,” says Campillo. “You find that in the films of Robert Bresson. I say that because my hand is in L’Argent.” In Bresson’s 1983 movie, Campillo’s hand, and only his hand, can be seen handing over a cassette in prison. “My hand was shaking so much because I was so frightened. I did 38 takes because Bresson was crazy.”

Returning to Enzo, Campillo explains that sex scenes in Cantet’s films tend to be “more modest” than the ones in, for example, 120 BPM. “The idea was to show desire with a simple gesture, not an actual demonstration,” says Campillo. “Even when they’re on the construction site, there’s sensuality when they talk under the shadow of a tree. When we discover the parents in the swimming pool, we can imagine they still make love. The film industry, especially in French cinema, is going further away from what it can show onscreen sexually. I wanted to show that everything can be sensual: the sun, the night, the wind.”

Campillo continues, “I wanted to use Laurent’s modesty to do something else. Not what he would do. Not what I would do. But something else. The film is a homage to Laurent, and I wanted to make something out of our friendship.”

Enzo is out in UK cinemas on June 5.