The friendship between two thirteen-year-old boys, Léo and Rémi, suddenly gets disrupted as schoolmates become aware of the intensity of their relationship. Girls – who are perhaps honest, or perhaps malicious – ask Léo if he and Rémi are a couple. Soon the boys are starting to make mean remarks to Léo, who is angry, scared and humiliated. He withdraws from Rémi, blanks him in the playground, goes in for macho ice hockey. Rémi is deeply baffled and wounded; Léo can hardly bear Rémi’s mute reproach, and has to confront his own fickle dishonesty.
"As a kid, I often denied myself an intimate relationship with another boy, because I feared that relationship. I read research by an American psychologist who followed around 100 boys between the ages of 13 and 18. At 13, she saw how those boys describe their friendships as being incredibly important to them. Their friends were the people they trusted, shared their secrets with, whom they loved. They weren’t afraid to express the love they felt for their friends. Then she re-interviewed them at 15, 16, 17 and 18. And with a lot of them, she saw how performance masculinity intervened. The intimacy those boys had with each other was interrupted." (Lukas Dhont)