Close To You

Is family the most important thing in the world? Will your family members really be there for you, no matter what? Should you put family unity first, regardless of the cost to your own mental health? Dominic Savage’s low key but incisive indie drama follows a young trans man, but the story is one that people from many different backgrounds will relate to.

Following the slew of coming out stories and related tragedies around the start of this decade, cinema’s interest in trans people has thankfully diversified and, more importantly, trans people themselves have started to have serious creative input beyond guerilla filmmaking. Eliot Page stars here as Sam, a young man who has built a life for himself in the city with people who understand him but feels obliged to return to his hometown to help his dad celebrate an important birthday. Page is also a producer, and his intimate understanding of the subject – along with Savage’s openness to his input – shows in multitudinous little ways which cumulatively work to shift the perspective we are used to in such narratives so that rather than watching Sam from a distance, with curiosity, we are very much aligned with him, experiencing the world as he does, noticing the things that don’t make sense about other people.

It is winter, but not, for the most part, the magical, sparkly kind. Instead we see grey skies everywhere, framed so that they seem to bear down on the characters. A similar thing happens with the shadows in the spacious suburban house where Sam is reunited with his family. There’s his father (Peter Outerbridge), who is quietly, deeply loving in that reserved way that some men are, without making a point of it. His mother (Wendy Crewson), who worries that she’ll get things wrong, panics when she uses the wrong pronoun; struggles, in her anxiety, to let him in. His sister, Meg (Alex Paxton-Beesley), who still seems to be stuck in the process or reevaluating their shared childhood, worrying that their closeness was an illusion, making too much of everything. And there’s her partner, Paul, one of those guys who always has to be the star of the show, who keeps trying to undermine Sam’s gender at the same time as perceiving him as a masculine rival.

“We all worry about you,” says Meg, trying to be supportive but making it sound as if Sam is putting them under pressure just by dint of his existence. One can feel the weight of what he’s not saying when he responds “I guess I just feel like you weren’t worrying about me when I was actually not okay.” Later, he’s told that he’s brave – that comment that people so often reserve for situations in which there is no choice, as if observing “Oh, you’re not dead yet,” and expecting a meaningful reply.

Alongside the effort of dealing with all this, and unbeknownst to his family, Sam is dealing with complex emotions related to reconnecting with his first love, Katherine (Hillary Baack). As he left town abruptly when he needed to transition, there are a lot of unresolved feelings between them. Their encounters represent the only real moments of beauty in the film. Though the actors themselves are not prettified, the landscapes surrounding them gradually take on a luminous quality. This is particularly striking during a walk on a snowy beach, when the ground beneath their feet reflects the vastness of the sky and there is nothing but sea all the way to the horizon. It’s the beginning of an opening up which makes room for them to explore their connection to one another and for viewers to see who Sam can be in the absence of pressure.

Close To You is a film that recognises the uneven distribution of emotional labour associated with someone being different. Sam’s parents accept the way he wants to live, so feel that they have done their bit – and as those who are not accepted will tell you, it’s a lot – but there are a lot of ways in which Sam is still the one expected to do the work. He’s expected to reassure and support his mother in her grief at having hurt him during his childhood, even though he’s the one who was hurt. He’s expected to accommodate everybody else’s choices without any visible emotional response, no matter how many painful memories they evoke. And when Paul deliberately pushes boundaries, again and again, he’s expected to rise above it. Savage asks a very simple question: why is this his job?

Within trans circles, it’s often said that transformative moments come not from dysphoria – the feeling of wrongness about one’s body or the gender role one is raised in – but from euphoria. Page’s raw performance takes us through a world of pain, and will help some viewers to understand the cost of it all for the first time. The real power of the film, however, lies in what we see of life beyond all this, of who Sam is when he can enjoy the freedom of just being an ordinary guy, interacting with a world that doesn’t care about his history.

Savage draws on the fact that we will all be familiar with domestic tension to build it up through incidents which, on their own, don’t seem like a big deal. Initially, viewers may feel that Sam is the unreasonable one, that he’s overreacting. The prison that these incidents combine to create is something that many viewers will also find familiar; but it’s only when the tension suddenly subsides that we can see it all clearly for what it is. Those questions then become a form of rebellion with much wider implications. Read at a social level, the film might also be seen as asking why we work so hard to keep on accommodating wilfully destructive elements at the expense of people who might seem a little different, but who are capable of thriving like everyone else.

An unusually intelligent, bold film which expands on an intimate situation to address much bigger themes, Close To You is exquisitely crafted and performed, and deserving of a wide audience.