Eastern Boys

Overview

You answer a knock at the door, thinking you’ll find a familiar face only to be met with an impromptu party. Sure, that doesn’t sound too bad — but when your expected visitor is a teenager you met in a train station the day before, arriving with his hustler friends in tow, it doesn’t sound too good, either.

This is where mild-mannered, middle-aged Daniel (Olivier Rabourdin) finds himself in Eastern Boys — and where cinema finds one of its most striking scenes in years. Shy-looking Ukrainian immigrant Marek (Kirill Emelyanov) arrives at Daniel’s apartment after accepting money for sex, his pals barging in, stealing stuff and trashing the place. Unravelling against an electronic soundtrack, it’s a sight that’s both unsettling and unforgettable. The movie takes its time in showing every detail of the home invasion, not only forcing Daniel to linger, but making the audience do the same. Prepare to feel stunned and awkward.

Prepare to keep watching, too, and not just taking in the visuals and following the storyline. Eastern Boys is a film of observation, making you look close and then closer, and then even closer again. You’d best be scrutinising everything you can see, from the long shots of Paris's crowded Gare du Nord and the dialogue-free glances that fill the feature’s first frames. The movie demands that you gaze from afar while trying to delve beneath the surface, which is also what it offers in its complicated character studies.

Never going where anyone might predict, this isn’t a tale about trouble and revenge, but a film that’s part love story, part thriller — and neither of those sticks with convention or worries about leaps in logic. Chapters signal shifts in the story, involving Daniel, Marek and Boss (Daniil Vorobyov), the volatile but charming Russian leader of the pack, as well. Power, survival, identity, affection and belonging are all wrapped up in a movie equally personal and topical. It manages to combine the attempts of men trying to carve out a different life however they can with a broader contemplation of class and immigration, and it does so with moments of horror, hope and heartbreak.

Anyone familiar with French TV series The Returned will know the kind of style writer/director/editor Robin Campillo’s favours in only his second effort as a filmmaker: slow-moving, atmospheric, precise and always showing rather than telling. Here, it’s an ideal fit for a narrative that doesn’t try to justify what is going on but instead wants viewers to witness the actions, reactions, interactions and transactions that make up its reality and draw their own conclusions.

Kudos also must go to his excellent cast for their naturalistic performances, specifically veteran Rabourdin and relative newcomers Emelyanov and Vorobyov. Making a movie feel intense, involving and intimate at the same time isn’t easy, but they ensure we’re always watching. Not that you have a choice — with a tale this simultaneously tense and tender, just try to look away.