Close To You bridges the distance between joys and solitudes
The film had its world premiere at TIFF 2023 and screens at Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival
British director Dominic Savage’s new film, Close To You, co-produced and written with Elliot Page, is visually speaking a slice of the Canadian film canon—astute and memorable for its languid cuts and close shots that look beautiful on the big screen.
Page stars as Sam, a trans man from Cobourg, Ont. who revisits his family for his father’s birthday after making a new life in Toronto. After a serendipitous and confusing encounter with Katherine, a childhood friend (Hillary Baack) on the train, he goes home with even more trepidation about returning to a place where he was not okay and misunderstood.
Punctuated with witty banter and moments of levity in ordinary life, Close To You shows that “classic” scenes—a family gathering, awkward reintroductions, unrequited love—can still be remade in ways that move. This is in thanks to a generous performance by Page, who since his breakout roles on the silver screen has undergone gender-affirming surgery and, over the past decade, has become more active behind the camera.
In Close To You, Page brings himself to the screen. His skin and body are such a part of the visual language of the film and he brings a soulfulness to the quieter frames, quips, and moments of internal dialogue. When it comes to the actual speaking, Page has revealed that the script was without dialogue and 100% improvised—an astounding fact given how cohesive the narrative feels.
“Are you seeing anyone?” seems to be the most recurrent question to someone whose gender or sexuality is nonconforming, or who is perhaps is undergoing any type of transition. Elegant cuts give the long shots movement, like cars on a train, taking you somewhere. This is a skillful intention that brings to an understated story the momentum it needs to cross the threshold from commentary to art.
A film can be judged by how invulnerable it is to scrutiny. That’s to say, whether or not it’s possible to tell if it was strategically marketed, impervious to its audience, or a film that has something for everyone. Close To You is a film that has the contours of universal experience, but it also has an educational component, as an eighteenth-century novel once did. There’s an homage to the need for greater representation, which illuminates the discomfort people have with trans people’s existence and alludes to the need for mental health supports at home and in health systems.
The film got its release at the Toronto International Film Festival amid a tide of LGBTQ hate and transphobia in North America. Whether it is a shooting at a U of Waterloo gender studies class or the Saskatchewan government engaging the notwithstanding clause to protect a policy that requires parental permission to change students’ pronouns, the realities at the heart of the story can be felt as a tide or a ripple.
Close To You is a meditation on distances—across time, between people. I’ve been on that train from Toronto to Cobourg, ruminating on the waves lapping the beaches of Lake Ontario. There’s an ode to how home is constructed physically and in the mind, the smallness of it set against a bigger city, improbable acts of love. You hope that Sam’s character can find a way to separate feelings of joy and sorrow, when they are so often soldered together.