By João Pedro Roriz
This review of the Belgian film “Young Hearts” has spoilers. But fans of Anthony Schatteman’s feature film are not worried about that, as they knew the filmeven before having watched it. It happened the same to me: I saw the film in short cuts through the social networks of my young readers even before accessing it on a video platform. There was a lot of recommendations, especially from those who read my juvenile book “The Mystery of the Four Seasons”, because they believe that both works have convergent points.
When I watched the movie, I was anesthetized. The work denotes the uniqueness of adolescence, the need for social interaction of young people and the important maintenance of the family structure that guarantees qualitative responses to the fears and insecurities that this phase of life generates in all of us. Watching this film, I relived some of the griefs of my childhood – the loss of childhood identity, the loss of childhood parents (almost always idealized) and the loss of the childhood body. The film provoked in me the desire to return to the universe of adolescence and to find effective solutions to some of my internal conflicts, a theme worked on in therapy and represented in many of my adolescent works.
Youthful passion and nostalgia are raw materials for successful cultural projects, whether American blockbusters or Shakespearean plays. The reference to “Romeo and Juliet” in the film is not merely illustrative: it is at the heart of a very well-constructed critique of the cultural and institutional barriers that separate young people in love and keep them bound by rigid political-social controls since Ancient times.
It is in this simple and deep film spoken in Dutch that youthful rebellion finally unleashes itself in an intelligent way, through thought and not actions, always at the service of deconstructing social imperatives that censor bodies and ideas. In the movie “Romeo and Juliet”, with DiCaprio and Danes, the young people in love see each other for the first time through the distortion provided by the water of an aquarium – a strong reference to the transitional spaces of childhood mentioned by Melanie Klein, marked by idyllic fantasies that cross reality and cloud the child’s conscious actions.
In “Young Hearts” the same happens: the aquarium is there, between Elias and Alexander. The first time, in a state of suffering to discover that he is homo-affective, Elias lets himself be carried away by the fanciful intimacy represented by the fish. It is because of this internal conflict that Elias separates from Alexander and comes into conflict with his boyfriend. While traveling with his grandfather, he finds a new aquarium and remembers his object of affection. Certain that he can deal with the objective reality in which he lives, in a clear allusion to the desire to ward off derivative thoughts, the protagonist knocks on the glass of the aquarium, scares the fish and laughs. With this scene, Schatteman subtly invites us to push away the neurotic fantasies derived from childhood, especially when they distract us from the main demands of adult life.
The film presents a functioning community, with families founded through tolerance, dialogue and loving bonds between its members. It is from this well-structured universe that the love between the two boys arises, who get closer in their neighborhood, at school and through deep interactions that value above all the stupor of passion and the disarray of their emotional tangles.
Saeger plays Alexander, the continental being, the reference of the well-resolved, trailblazer, masculine and happy boy – owner of a security built in the forge of a liberal education. Goossens, in the role of Elias, is the protagonist, one of the best actors of his generation, owner of a mature and fascinatingly realistic dramatic capacity. His role is delicate and feminine, owner of a Jungian Anima revealed drop by dropto the public. The tears, smiles and Stanislavski looks of this young actor lend credibility to the film and hyperbolize the emotion of his fans, girls and boys.
Author and director Anthony Schatteman takes on the sexual latency of the characters and defends them by symbolically distancing them from an adult sexual logic. Thus, it respects the limits of the characters’ newly discovered adolescence and, in this way, does not contradict the most conservative mentalities. This care provides an opportunity for poetic convergence with different audiences. The work is articulated from a plural and dichotomous point of view and evades the LGBT bubble, as it causes emotional relief to young people who need hope in family functionality, in the conquest of minority rights, in the certainty that wishes can come true and in the healthy relationship between friends, especially in schools.
Thus, the conquest by the teenage audience, especially this Alpha Generation, will happen through short lines, brief scenes and perfect denouements for desiderative situations. An assertive strategy, because psychologists have already made it clear, through academic research, that this is a generation that demands jouissance even before condensations – that is, they only throw themselves into constructions (drive condensations) when they realize that there is a chance of displacement of desire and discharge (jouissance) of emotions at the end of the process.
The work also has controversial points: there is an expectation of greater crisis on the part of the characters. The director is right not to present the typical drama with a tragic ending commonly observed in feature films with LGBT subtitles, however, at times it presents very idealized conflict resolutions. It is important to note that the action of the characters is not strange: it is always in the latent universe of the boy Elias who discovers his sexuality. In this sense, the author/director takes advantage of the expressiveness of his protagonist actor to present the character’s internal soliloquies in the best Dostoevsky style.
The story takes place inside an idealized Belgium, whose liberal society is determined to embrace diversity. The optimism of the author/director may not be realistic, but it builds a parallel narrative that feeds the current young people with hope. His telluric and unrealistic vision of the world is also imprinted in the always assertive dialogues of the teenagers, in the texture of warming and warm photography, in the contact of individuals with a paradisiacal nature and with the ease of understanding between the naturally Therapeutae characters. In other words, the director decided to eliminate the crises experienced by humanity today: the dichotomy between right and left, the evolution of the far-right arguments against gender diversity and global warming.It is not a coincidence: many today’s adolescents and young adults are tired of the themes of the twentieth century and dream of finally taking possession of new themes in this new and idealized twenty-first century. They are minds that want the immediate cessation of humanitarian crises; that demand an end to deforestation and pollution, but that, contradictory, invest heavily in digital relations and in the virtual universe that impose on the world the end of capitalism as we know it and the beginning of a new era marked by techno-feudalism. This is another theme of an environmental and ecological nature that does not seem to disturb the characters who live in Schatteman’s comfortable world: the teenagers in this film are not addicted to the internet and seem to live in an analog era marked by healthy social relationships. Whether it was unintentional or on purpose, we don’t know. But it is a fact that this transforms the film into a place where we all want to live, capable of being watched many, many times by the idyllic teenagers who reside within us.
Another relevant factor in the work is the group neurosis experienced by Elias and Alexander’s group of friends – a continental extension of the families of the two protagonists. In Wilfred Bion’s studies on the nature of group dynamics, certain unconscious logics that are contained in the feature film in question are observed. Among them, the anxiety surrounding adolescence itself stands out: a very short phase marked by emotion, the discovery of sexuality, the mourning of the loss of childhood, the search for identity and the fear of adult life. Elias’ group of friends seeks in the union of its members a form of self-regulation in the face of their individual psychological needs. This system of compensations generates expectations and interests among its members: the search for group leadership, the unconscious desire to maintain adolescence through fraternal bonds and the interest in the extension of the group from the union of its individuals – which consecrates the perpetuation of the group purpose through the pact, the contract of emotional and sexual union.
It is important to talk about the discovery of Elias’s sexuality and his transmutation from the latency period to the genital phase. This birth is not noisy as we see in American and Latin American works: it is continent, reserved and sweetened with the honey of well-resolved parental relationships, softened by the conversations and elucidations of the elders. The nature of Elias’ desires, fears and jealousy towards Alexander will also call into question the ancient adversity of two extremes – liberal and conservative – which has always created antagonism between ID and superego, between desires and reproaches in any human being, with a higher mortality rate among teenagers, dystopian, impulsive, adventurous and passionate.
Of course, Schatteman would reserve moments of neurosis and aggressiveness for his protagonist, especially when he tries to free himself from the emotional involvement with his egoic father and with his own heteronormative culture. The most attentive viewer will realize that there is already a homo-affective logic in the protagonist’s family concentrated and triggered through the artistic narcissism of Elias’ father. It is a symbolic homosexuality, because the man identifies himself lovingly with another man who is himself. In an act of desperation and disturbance of the family hierarchical order, the protagonist breaks the frame with the gold record won by his father-singer. With this, symbolically, he breaks the Oedipal contract with his father and definitively inscribes himself in a new mentality. This scene answers some questions about the homo-affective Oedipus: it is evident that the boy who is born gay will seek in his father the object of affection just as a straight boy will seek in his mother.
One of the most moving scenes happens at the very end of the film, when Elias has a frank conversation with his grandfather. It is the moment when the young man discovers that he will not lose the love of the male members of his family if he has a love interest in a boy. The farmer and self-sufficient grandfather clarifies that love is the dominant imperative in human relationships and gives the official authorization for the boy to finally take off his social clothes and dive into the lake of his individual needs. Thus, he symbolically gains a new baptism, where he gets a new name and a new identity. The most beautiful thing is to see his grandfather dive with Elias in this same lake, denoting that he is also an evolving being, interested in deconstructing himself at every moment.
“Young Hearts” is an invitation to deconstruct paradigms, to accept new social trends and to accept desires. Schatteman shows that it is possible to build an ideal world within the real world, if there is dignity and minimally convergent spaces that respect and guarantee individual rights.
João Pedro Roriz is a psychoanalyst, master’s in psychology from Feevale, RS, Brazil, author of 40 books, most of them for children and adolescents. Contact: jproriz@gmail.com | www.joaopedrororiz.com.br.
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