Lucas’ (Paul Kircher) world is turned upside down after the sudden death of his father (Christophe Honoré) in a car accident.  After the funeral, he goes to live with his older brother Quinten (Vincent Lacoste) in Paris for a few weeks before starting up a new school closer to home to help support his mother, Isabelle (Juliette Binoche).  Beset with grief, guilt, anger, remorse, and regret, Lucas wanders the lonely streets of Paris looking for a human connection to give his life purpose now that his father has passed. 

After debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival, Christophe Honoré’s Winter Boy, a tribute to his own father, was widely brought to the United States as part of the Mubi Spotlight series.  The French writer/director is no stranger to working in the realm of queer themes, unconventional displays of affection, teenage angst, and human tragedy.  With Winter Boy, a strange translation of the original Le lycéen which directly translates to “The High School Student,” Honoré brings together all of his fascinations into a kaleidoscopic portrait of pain as Lucas reflects back on some of the most difficult of our emotions to process.  The 122-minute odyssey is probing and poignant – and for the cynic: melodramatic – but for those who find empathy for Lucas, Winter Boy will awaken something deep and tragic from within. 

The film opens and quickly takes on a very frustrating structure, like dumping out the pieces of a puzzle and only seeing fractions of the whole picture, as Lucas narrates to us between a mix of a confessional, black-backed medium close-up and voiceover.  The script has him oscillate between various times, locations, and scene partners with dialogue such as “I’m not ready to talk about that” or instruction to the audience not to try and find a deeper connection to how he is splitting the story, but rather just accept its fractured nature and trust that Chantal Hymans’ editing will not lead us astray.  Thankfully, the story begins to level out and slowly take shape after the funeral – a reflection of Lucas’ life beginning to refocus as he enters into this new chapter without his father – but it is in the chaos that we realize we bonded in empathy with the boy. 

With the family together, it falls on Isabelle to help the boys cope with their volatile emotions, and as an audience we see that this can be a precarious task as the two boys do not seem to see eye to eye on much.  Through Isabelle’s own pain and grief, Binoche gives herself totally over to the role and allows Rémy Chevrin’s camera to capture her tears which she desperately tries to hide from her boys.  There is a beautiful moment early on in the planning of the service as the family tries to settle on music, and Isabelle suggests an EDM song which she and her husband would always share a Christmas Eve dance together.  Tears are mixed with smiles and it is the first sign that things will be okay, but it will take some time.  Binoche brings such grace to the screen and is an incredibly giving performer, in all her roles, but especially here so that Kircher, in only his third feature role and first dramatic role, has the freedom to stretch his own ability and the safety of a scene partner who will let him explore and discover.  It is a story about vulnerability, and the trust which is brokered between the three is indelible and it all starts with Isabelle bringing her sons together. 

Much of the film, however, finds Lucas spending his days in Paris with a reluctant Quinten and his roommate, Lilio (Erwan Kepoa Falé), who forges a curious kinship with the youth.  With the city open to him and little holding him back – there is a fading connection with his decidedly not boyfriend, Oscar (Adrien Casse) back home – Lucas takes to the streets to start his adventure in emotional nihilism.  Barred from the flat during the day while Quinten meets with an art curator for his work, Lucas waders around seeking anonymous sex as a way to ward off the feelings of loneliness and despair from being cut off from his friends back at the boarding school and the abandonment of his father; if life is going to take him away from the people he loves, then he will never love again while still reaping the benefits of connection.  

This lone-wolf approach is all working well enough until he begins to fall for Lilio. Once again his affections find young Lucas in trouble and his display sets off a chain of events that will find him reeling from yet another abandonment which leads into the third act of the film with Lucas in a psychiatric care facility. At this point, it feels as if the film is winding down only to have an extra act hidden away waiting to reveal itself, and though those who are not invested in Lucas’ plight by this point will likely not find anything redeeming here, Honoré – slowly but surely – begins to instill just the slightest glimmers of hope into the narrative. Lucas has given up speaking, but he appears to have moments of joy as he runs through the grounds or shares a dessert with his brother. This metamorphosis is not just limited to Lucas. Isabelle, in one of the best scenes of the film, finds herself alone in a play yard laughing alone as she shoots hoops, but she is weightless; the same weightlessness that is displayed in the final shot of the film of Lucas playing the guitar, looking up at the camera, and smiling again for the first time in who knows how long.  

Winter Boy, on its face value, seems like any number of queer, coming-of-age tragedies, but Honoré rather adeptly takes the broad collection of genre elements and tinkers with them enough so that it can become something all of its own. Despite its heavy themes of trauma and guilt, it remains a highly stylized and impeccably designed film, as if the color palette and patterns of a Wes Anderson film had been transported out of his purposefully artificial worlds and used to color in our own. Instead of drowning the film in dark and morose colors, Honoré seems more content to focus on, without being too on the nose about it, the silver linings. The dark before the dawn. The time that heals all wounds. Winter Boy is certainly no fairytale ending, but it is a happy one – something severely lacking in the queer cannon – and with a wonderfully empathetic and emotional lead performance from Kircher, only the hardest of hearts will come away from this film still chilled.