Winter Boy

Seventeen-year-old Lucas is asleep at his boarding school when his older brother and a family friend come into the room. His father has had an accident. Before they reach home the boy understands his father is dead. In the weeks that follow, Lucas forces himself to keep moving, to sleep with strangers, to hold on to nobody. The film is not interested in grief. It is interested in grief turning into energy: instead of weeping Lucas accelerates, and tries to pull everyone around him into his speed. The film does not judge it, and does not avoid showing where it leads. The form is close and mobile: handheld camera, passages where the character speaks straight to it, a structure moving between a town in the foothills of the Alps and Paris. Christophe Honoré wrote and directed. The film is openly autobiographical; Honoré lost his own father in a car accident when he was fifteen and calls this his most personal work. He plays the father himself in a few early scenes. Paul Kircher plays Lucas, Vincent Lacoste the brother and Juliette Binoche the mother. Who it is for: viewers who like French coming-of-age drama and Honoré's cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting distance. The film stays on top of its character throughout, is explicit in its sex scenes and repeats itself in the middle.