14/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: In directing the last film by the late Laurent Cantet, Robin Campillo weaves a subtle tale of a teenager in search of his place in the world

“Everyone's partying like everything's fine. I'm not like you.” As we all know, adolescence is a tumultuous time. At 16, Enzo [+see also:
interview: Robin Campillo
film profile], the protagonist of Robin Campillo's film of the same name, which opened the 57th Directors' Fortnight at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, is no exception, and his parents, like so many others, are trying as best they can to adapt to the situation and all its elusiveness.

So it's a seemingly simple story that the film plunges into under the June sun in the South of France. The cicadas are singing, the swimming pools are inviting and life seems sweet. But for Enzo (newcomer Eloy Pohu), who is torn between a benevolent middle-class family and the harshness of work on a building site where his rejection of the traditional school system has led him, nothing is crystal clear. And it is these very subtle nuances that the French filmmaker explores to marvellous effect by agreeing to direct (with his own qualities), in a fine tribute and token of friendship, the last film of the late Laurent Cantet, whose career he almost entirely accompanied as co-writer and editor (notably the 2008 Palme d'Or winner The Class [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Carole Scotta
interview: Laurent Cantet
film profile]).

“A 16-year-old drowning before our very eyes and we let him!” Enzo's father (Pierfrancesco Favino, Italian) who is a teacher,  finds it very hard to accept his son's decision to turn his back on traditional studies (“I don't want to learn, I want to work, I'll never go back to school”) and on future prospects more in keeping with his social background. While his mother (Élodie Bouchez), an engineer, tries to smooth things over. As for the teenager, he befriends Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi), a 25-year-old Ukrainian labourer who has come to France to earn money, but who has questions about his relationship with his war-torn country. A friendship that precipitates events for Enzo, who hides nothing and wants to make his own choices, but who in reality (and this is normal at his age) “doesn't really know where he lives”...

With its finely woven narrative (the screenplay is by Laurent Cantet, Robin Campillo and Gilles Marchand), Enzo offers its four excellent lead actors a rich, delicate playground in an elegant and organic production. The film builds up its plot in small, controlled chunks, on the edge of social realism and existentialist family melodrama, in a sunny atmosphere and with a concentrated humanist simplicity which pays tribute to Laurent Cantet, a highly talented filmmaker imbued with modesty and kindness

Enzo was produced by Les Films de Pierre in co-production with France 3 Cinéma, Page 114, Ami Paris, Belgian production companies Les Films du Fleuve, Be TV and RTBF, and Italy’s Lucky Red. mk2 Films will be handling international sales.

(Translated from French)