‘Enzo’ review: Directors’ Fortnight opens with Laurent Cantet’s last film, directed by Robin Campillo

Dirs. Robin Campillo, Laurent Cantet. France/Italy/Belgium. 2025. 102mins. 

Directed by Robin Campillo, but credited up front as ‘a film by Laurent Cantet’, Enzo is a powerful valedictory from Cantet, the acclaimed French writer-director who died last year aged 62. It is also the last flowering of a very productive artistic partnership, Robin Campillo having edited and co-written several Cantet features, notably Time Out, Heading South and 2008 Palme d’Or winner The Class. Spare and direct, but very insightful as a study of male adolescence in our fraught times, Directors’ Fortnight opener Enzo makes a low-key but resonant coda to Cantet’s work, while thematically also being highly consistent with Campillo’s directorial output.

 Rounds off Cantet’s cycle of films about the challenges of young adulthood

Campillo came on board as director shortly before the shoot (director Gilles Marchand, a collaborator with both Cantent and Campillo, is also credited as script and direction adviser). Cantet had already been active in the casting – including the choice of Enzo’s charismatic, intriguingly elusive young lead, newcomer Eloy Pohu. He plays Enzo, a 16 year-old studying as a masonry apprentice and first seen toiling, none too competently, on a building site in the baking French heat (the setting is the Marseilles area, specifically La Ciotat).

Rather than being working-class, as we might have expected, Enzo is from a well-heeled professional family, with an elegant modernist house in the hills complete with swimming pool. His high-achieving parents – maths academic Paolo (Italian cinema mainstay Pierfrancesco Favino) and engineer Marion (Elodie Bouchez) – despair of him. While his older brother is set on a mainstream higher education route, Enzo has chosen apprenticeship because, he insists, he has no ambitions or skills. In fact, the drawings on his bedroom wall proclaim that Enzo has real talent, but has chosen to deny it.

At the worksite, he begins to connect with his Ukrainian exile co-workers, who have different views on their responsibilities towards their war-torn nation. In what proves to be a conflicted relationship with site foreman Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi), the contradictions of Enzo’s adolescent identity begin to unfold in terms of his awareness of the wider world, his entitled background, and his sexuality. As regards the latter, the film is very much in keeping with the gay thematics of Campillo’s features, notably Eastern Boys, BPM (Beats Per Minute) and last year’s Red Island. But Enzo also rounds off Cantet’s cycle of films about the challenges of young adulthood, from The Class through to his last two features The Workshop and Arthur Rambo.

Set during high summer, the film is exceptionally atmospheric and tactile in its evocation of the Midi as a place of both pampered leisure and gruelling work, with the sweat and dust of the worksite vividly embodying the life that Enzo has, for now at least, committed to. As his sympathetic but confused parents, Bouchez and Favino – the latter more than creditably performing in French – portray a mix of indulgence, testy authority and tenderness, while Malou Khebizi (from last year’s Cannes-featured Wild Diamond) makes the most of a small but telling role as a sexually confident girl who tries to bring Enzo out of his shell.

Vlad, meanwhile, is a complex figure highlighted as both role model and object of desire to Enzo – Slivinskyi’s relaxed performance and Belmondo-ish looks combining to eloquent effect. The film plays keenly on the tentative flickerings of homo-eroticism in workplace male bonding, subtly approaching the challenge of depicting teenage desire in a character who is a minor. Arguably, the war in Ukraine is less convincingly integrated into the whole as a background theme, although the final sequence persuasively crystallises the key question of whether we can choose our own fates, or whether history, environment and politics determine them for us.