What’s to be done when an auteur can no longer, well, auteur? When Michelangelo Antonioni, the veteran Italian director behind L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, had a stroke in the 1980s, it left him unable to speak. He continued to work, making his film Beyond the Clouds, from 1995, with the assistance of his fellow director Wim Wenders. In 2001 Steven Spielberg completed work on the late Stanley Kubrick’s long-gestating AI Artificial Intelligence.
Now Robin Campillo, the director of BPM, is adding to this film-making subset.
Enzo is introduced as “a film by” Laurent Cantet, who died from cancer in April 2024, three months before his friend Campillo called “Action” on set. It was a solemn duty.
“Near the end Laurent told me, ‘Now you are free. You can make your own film,’” Campillo says. “I told him, ‘If I direct this film, another person will be making it. I don’t even know what my own style means.’ And he answered, ‘I know. I don’t care if it becomes closer to you.’
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“That gave both of us a kind of peace. Because the film still belonged to Laurent in my mind, I felt less anxious than I normally would directing. I felt almost like a soldier carrying out a mission for someone else.”
Campillo and Cantet wrote Enzo together; their friendship dates from film school. They could finish each other’s sentences while toiling in an editing suite. Campillo, to characterise their relationship, refers to the philosopher Maurice Blanchot’s idea that true friendship is based on comfortable silence.
“I met him in 1983,” he says. “Cinema is really what brought us together. We were learning how to use a camera and load film side by side. Over the years our lives evolved separately in some ways. He even married a friend of mine from high school. But we always remained very close. We were almost like brothers.
“At a certain point I had moved away from cinema somewhat, because I was deeply involved in Aids activism and the Act Up movement. But when he began making films, he drew me back. He asked me to edit his first films, and thanks to him I returned to cinema.”
Campillo first came to prominence as cowriter and editor of Cantet’s socially conscious films. He worked on Human Resources, a startling 1999 portrait of labour relations in a French factory, followed by Time Out, a film about a man who desperately hides his unemployment from his family.
The pair subsequently wrote The Class, set in a Paris middle school, which was feted for its naturalistic dialogue and ensemble, winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes film festival in 2008 and scoring a nomination for best foreign-language film at the Academy Awards.
These Cantet-Campillo collaborations were praised for their kitchen-sink realism and convincing use of amateur actors. But the rhythms, as Campillo points out, are golden-age Hollywood.
“People saw Laurent as a realist director, but he was deeply inspired by melodrama and film-makers like Douglas Sirk,” he says. “Human Resources looks simple, but underneath it’s very sophisticated. He loved cinema that could hold class, emotion, family and desire all at once. That tension between realism and melodrama was central to his work.”
Cinema is not always about understanding people completely. Sometimes it’s about preserving their mystery
— Campillo
The new film certainly fits with that description. Enzo, a 16-year-old played by the newcomer Eloy Pohu, defies his very bourgeois family’s expectations and lifestyle. While they live in a gated villa in the south of France, their stubborn son starts a masonry apprenticeship.
The parents, a mathematics teacher and an engineer, would prefer the boy to enrol at art school, but he seems committed to taking an alternative path.
Enzo defies expectations further upon meeting Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi, also a first-timer), a Ukrainian construction worker who opens up his world to unexpected possibilities – and a secret crush.
“Laurent was fascinated by the idea that this bourgeois child would choose manual labour and put his body in danger,” Campillo says. “For the father it’s incomprehensible, because bourgeois society imagines success in only one direction. The actor playing Vlad told me he didn’t want to return to construction sites, because he didn’t want to grow old there. That reality mattered deeply to the film.”
Street casting has provided a vital force in films by Cantet and Campillo. Most recently Campillo cast the newcomer Charlie Vauselle and the Malagasy actor Amely Rakotoarimalala in Red Island, the director’s semi-autobiographical account, from 2023, of growing up on a French military base in early-1970s Madagascar.
“When you work with nonprofessional actors they transform the character you imagined,” Campillo says. “The film becomes richer, because they bring contradictions you could never invent. At the end of the shoot I realised I knew almost nothing about the actor playing Enzo, and I loved that. Cinema is not always about understanding people completely. Sometimes it’s about preserving their mystery.”
Herman Melville has long cast a whale-sized shadow across French cinema. Jean-Pierre Melville, godfather of the French nouvelle vague, borrowed his pseudonym from the author of Moby Dick. Claire Denis’s Beau Travail transports Melville’s Billy Budd to the deserts of Djibouti, where the French Foreign Legion are training.
Enzo revisits a great French favourite: Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, which was previously adapted by Maurice Ronet in the 1970s. In Melville’s novella Bartleby is a law-copyist who gradually refuses every request made of him, always replying: “I would prefer not to.” At first he declines menial office tasks, then stops working entirely, and eventually refuses to leave the office all together.
“We didn’t want Enzo to be a teenager who simply fights with his father,” says Campillo (who receives a “directed by” credit for the film). “We were inspired by Bartleby: ‘I would prefer not to.’ He resists quietly, creating crisis around him without becoming openly dramatic. He destabilises everyone, including Vlad. What interested us was allowing him to remain contradictory and impossible to fully define.”
Campillo made his directorial debut with Les Revenants, which, with echoes of the Aids crisis, reshaped the zombie genre into a study of institutional failings. The film depicts a small town in which thousands of deceased residents suddenly return to life. It premiered at the Venice film festival and was later adapted into a successful television series.
Throughout all of Campillo’s work, sex, class and politics form a Gordian knot. In Eastern Boys, his second feature as writer-director, sexual desire is inseparable from economic and migratory inequality: older French men and young eastern European migrants negotiate transactional intimacy across a backdrop of precarity, trafficking and exploitation. In BPM, Campillo draws on his time with Act Up Paris during the early HIV epidemic to reframe queer sex as both a site of joy and political activism and a battleground for survival.
“Most films separate intimacy from politics, but for myself and Laurent they are completely connected,” Campillo says. “Desire is shaped by class, economics and history. Enzo’s attraction to Vlad is not innocent. Vlad represents freedom, masculinity, foreignness and danger all at once. We wanted the political, emotional and erotic dimensions of the story to exist together inside the same scenes.”
The Moroccan-born director has so far won the Grand Prix at Cannes, four César awards and a European Film Award. But making Enzo was a different kind of honour.
“When Laurent became ill I told him I would stay beside him through every stage of the film,” Campillo says. “We never imagined he would die so quickly. Suddenly there were practical questions nobody wants to think about: insurance papers, responsibilities and preparing for the possibility that I might have to take over. Emotionally, it became extremely difficult.
“After he died I realised what a gift it was that we had already decided I would continue the film. Otherwise we would all have been paralysed by grief.”
Enzo is in cinemas from Friday, June 5th
