Hair connects two men to a thin Belgian drama

Anyone who has recently traveled to Constantinople is a familiar if an annoying spectacle. The hordes of men walking without knives around the city’s tourist spots with their bare scalps, bleeding and sometimes confused – survivors not a recent zombie revelation, but any of Turkey’s famous accessible hair transplant clinics. The jokes at their own expense is easy and cheap, though each of these ruddy head injuries covers an individual story of insecurity and fragile hope for more abundant days ahead. Two of them are said, with tactics and care and a little absurd spirit, to the Belgian director Manoël Dupont of the Small Miniature “Before/After”, a film that faces the hair transplant industry with respect, and even journalistic interest, but not as a cure-all the protagonists.

A standout at this year’s Proxima Contest in Karlovy varies, where he received a special reference from the jury, “Before/After” is a short, seamless character study with a new semi-documentary: Although the film is mostly directed by two-man. They themselves and the processes and transformations with which they are the display exclusive. This gives processes a support, honest authenticity, as well as unusually increased human stakes – the concerns that occur at all stages of the process here are real.

The fact that the film is also a gentle, sensitive depiction of a newly established homosexual relationship could see that it will gain attraction to LGBT FEST and the distribution circuit-was taken last month from French sales oriented French sales-

Late one night, Jérémy (Jérémy Lamblot) and Baptiste (Baptiste Leclere) meet by accident: the first one who hits a house, takes the last one who lives in his car for some time. A small speech leads to a drink in the big house that Jérémy has inherited from his last father. There is an obvious shy attraction between the two, but the two men, both approach 30, first of all above their mutual male pattern of baldness. Baptiste, tall and heavy, attempts to offset it with shoulder length locks. The lighter the Jérémy gestures to his relative youth with diamond earrings. Dupont’s writing, crisp and compact and minimal in the backstory, refers to deeper damage to every person than their dilutions – though hair, at least, is a lost thing that they feel they can regain.

With a quick cut we are in Istanbul, where Jérémy and Baptiste have closed a cheap hotel room and a series of hair clinics consultations. It is not clear how much time has passed, though the couple, familiar, if not exactly a couple, do not seem to know each other all so well – the common ritual of a hair transplant covers a gateway to a new life for both. Their concerns look small in a turkey that emerged from the 2023 presidential election: shooting on the busy streets of the city, Dupont and DP Thibaut Egler record a sense of community concern that strikes our own and our own way. In part, if they do not play entirely in strange conditions, Lamblot and Leclere give wonderful, quiet delicious performances, in relation to one mixture of riot and sincere need.

The function, meanwhile, is observed in a methodical detail both morbid and tender, as we are part of the anxiety of linguistic barriers at critical points of contact, in the hands of the last minutes above the new entrants and the panic of separation when they finally go under the scalpel. The meeting is important for men right now – “If we end up with hair, we will both be on the same boat,” they agree, strangely romantic – though what is in front of them is uncertain. “A page is turning, I can become a young man,” says Jérémy shortly after the business, and later, he and Baptiste are naked together, holding each other as mirrors in my supposedly refreshed male Mojo. A cute ambiguous final act, however, calls on the question of how different you can feel for how long, before you do some less cosmetic projects to yourself.