2025 Cannes Film Festival Reviews: ‘Enzo,’ ‘Urchin,’ ‘Pillion’
From boys to men, these three films look at a teen’s coming out, a man’s struggle with his darkest demons and two men who find love (?) in a hopeless place.
Enzo (Laurent Cantet and Robin Campillo, Director’s Fortnight)
Enzo is in a crisis of identity. A 16-year old masonry apprentice, the French teenager has bourgeois but supportive parents (divinely played by Pierfrancesco Favino and Elodie Bouchez) but wants to fit in with his working class co-workers. Handsome as a model, Enzo’s exterior doesn’t match his interior, as split as two personalities can be. He’s creative, a proficient drawing artist, but doesn’t have the avenue to pursue it, especially with academic parents. He’s a rebel without a clue.
All much his elders, his construction mates poke and prod him about having a girlfriend and how much he gets laid. Among the group is Ukrainian Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi), in his early 20s and with the war in his horizon, he’s both masculine and tender, a charismatic vessel for Enzo, both as something he seems to want to be but also as someone with whom he finds himself undeniably attracted to. After a night of clubbing, Vlad suggests Enzo stay at his place as his roommate is out that night. In the middle of the night Enzo, with unabashed guilelessness, luxuriates over Vlad as he lay sleeping, moving his hand along his chest. Vlad startles him and sends him back to his bed but unlike most stories like this, it isn’t met with direct violence. Even as he’s sent away, there’s a sense, both from Enzo and us, that it’s not simply a closed door. In his film debut, Eloy Pohu brings a freshness to Enzo, a nervous immaturity where spontaneous actions can be brave or stupid. Slivinskyi finds exceptional balance as an object of affection while still genuinely caring for Enzo. If a lot of this sounds like Call My Your Name, you’d be right to think so. It’s a tale that doesn’t stray far outside the lines of a young man infatuated by a slightly older one story we’ve seen before but it doesn’t really need to.
“A Laurent Cantet film, directed by Robin Campillo” is how Enzo is introduced, a final collaboration for the pair, if a sad and necessary one, as Cantent (Palme d’Or winner for 2008’s The Class) began production on the film but fell ill early on and died before completion, and Campillo (the seminal modern gay classic, 2017’s 120 BPM) stepped in to direct. The result is a fine balance of the two filmmakers, as Cantet handed the reins off to Campillo so does Vlad to Enzo, giving him the confidence to make his next journey.
Grade: B
Urchin (Harris Dickinson, Un Certain Regard)
The directing debut from actor Harris Dickinson (Beach Rats, Triangle of Sadness, Babygirl) follows Mike (Frank Dillane), a London man spiraling through drug addiction, homelessness and joblessness, and finds nooks and crannies of originality in a familiar story. For Harrison, an outspoken activist against the failed government policies of homeless people, it’s a call to action and direct commentary, and for a first film, speaks with great confidence, fire and passion.
When Mike commits a desperate act of theft that leads to a brutal and unnecessary violent end, it lands him in prison. Even with the system being an extra weight on Mike’s already bent over shoulders, he’s still given an opportunity post-release with a job in a hotel kitchen and a room in a hostel from social worker Nadia (Shonagh Marie). But it’s not long before that job goes south
Dillane is spectacular here, giving a performance that is spiky and electric, like Gary Oldman in the 80s and early 90s.
Harrison employs effective brief flights of fancy and surrealism in the form of memories that track Mike’s lapses and relapses, not quite psychological breaks, but cracks that let us into his mind for fleeting moments and to escape his own mortality for moments at a time. While it might feel like a gimmick of a first-time director, it’s one of the more immersive and well-executed versions of inner turmoil that doesn’t distance the viewer but pulls them in. Hopefully this isn’t a one-and-done for Harrison as he shows great maturity behind the camera, and even more importantly, empathy.
Grade: A
Pillion (Harry Lighton, Un Certain Regard)
Hands grip, thighs clench, leather tightens.
Colin (Harry Melling of The Queen’s Gambit and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) is a parking cop by day and in a barbershop quartet with his father (The Great‘s Douglas Hodge) in pubs by night. Timid, teeth like jagged little pills, one night while he’s on an unsuccessful date he sees biker Ray (an unspeakably sexy Alexander Skarsgård). He doesn’t know it yet but he’s looking for a guy in dominance, 6’5″, blue eyes. Skarsgård’s lanky hotness, a physically intimidating trait on its own, grabs Colin’s attention and Ray notices as he slips him a note to meet up the next night, on Christmas no less, for what amounts to be a test in an alley. Ray is a dom looking for a new sub and Colin is just happy to be there, even if his head-giving skills could use some work. Lighton isn’t out to overly explain or lay on thick exposition of the dynamics of what a gay dom/sub relationship consists of and essentially we’re in Colin’s shoes here in that regard, and we’re all licking Skarsgård’s boots.
As Colin begins to sleep over at Ray’s, first rolled up on the floor, there is a domesticity settling into place and while the dom/sub roles do mirror the heteronormative traditions of husband/wife roles, the creation of this gay subculture was to fuck with it, and it does. To live inner lives on the outside, without secrets and certainly without shame. A camping trip that consists of fishing as much as it does fisting strikes a chord of normalcy that is both bracing and idyllic. Melling, so good in supporting roles, is front and center here in one of the year’s best performances as Colin.
One of the funniest films of the year, yet never in the name of kinkshaming, upon returning home after that night of giving Christmas head, Colin’s father (unknowingly) remarks, “Told you the cold night would turn your throat inside out.” By the time “I Think We’re Alone Now”plays while Colin and Ray wrestle in assless singlets it’s clear that Lighton wants the audience to have fun with his mischievous touches as we chart Colin’s self-discovery in ways unexpected, romantic and aspirational.
Grade: A-
Pillion will be released theatrically in the U.S. by A24.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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