(Possibly) the best film I've ever seen
- Joe Bleasdale
- Aug 20
- 24 min read
I’ve always struggled with film as a medium. Not least the cinema itself, which, as someone with sensory processing issues, can be exhausting, with its bright lights, sudden loud noises, incessant rustling of snacks and murmuring from the back row while you’re trying to concentrate on every tiny detail for 100 minutes, already a toll on my attention span that was trained on 30-minute small-screen light entertainment shows.
In addition, I’ve always found it weird that, until very recently, it was just a given that the entire cultural nurturing of a kid in the UK was done by the creative minds of one specific postcode on the West Coast of the US, over 5000 miles away from home. ‘Watching a film’ meant ‘watching a Hollywood film’, be it a Disney animation (or Dreamworks – #ShrekIsLove) or whatever US summer blockbusters made their way to the UK in the winter. These films, with their self-indulgent, sanitised, franchise-friendly nature, ability to swerve source material and be sparing with minor details like, say, casting US actors as Brits, or able-bodied actors as disabled characters, always left me feeling very hollow, even the ones people refer to as ‘classic’. Just think of the thousands of autistic kids who were advised to watch Rain Man by well-meaning parents and teachers who found it a relatable romp, only to be left thoroughly disappointed.
Therefore, when I find one that captures my imagination, one that’s so stunning, emotional and breath-taking, that it makes me forget my aversion for the genre, it becomes the single greatest thing in existence, and something I can’t stop talking about for weeks. Taking culture modules at university meant I was exposed to a lot of Latin American cinema, from directors who aspire to the firework-over-feeling nature of Hollywood, and many of whom have gone on to this, but have small enough budgets that the heart for creating art over product takes over. When people ask me what my favourite film is, I tell them it’s Amores perros, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s directorial debut from 2000, which is essentially Mexico’s answer to Pulp Fiction, but with even grittier characters and doggos. I went through every emotion watching it, and it held my full attention for 155 minutes, a record not yet beaten even by the best TV drama. Of course, my actual favourite film is Hot Fuzz, or for that matter, any of the Cornetto trilogy, a masterclass in creating hilarious, quotable comedy films for both people who love cinema and people who just want mindless escapism and knob gags. But ‘Simon Pegg’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it at Old Compton cocktail meet-ups than ‘Gael García Bernal’.
Now, like with most things in my life that get misinterpreted, I don’t prefer non-English language films because I think I’m better than everyone else. I’m just saddened that there are so many authentic stories that are lost to the hegemony of the Hollywood bubble because a mainstream audience isn’t fully on-board with subtitles, something that makes my life a hell of a lot easier even in English due to, among what I discussed earlier, the terrible sound quality of modern-day TV, and the fact the bloke sat next to me is eating a hotdog right now. To some people, if they can’t understand it, it’s not worth their time. An amazing ‘foreign’ film is still seen as less worthwhile than a mediocre film in your own language, depending on your experience. Your average Brit whose only exposure to non-English language pop music is the Macarena and the Ketchup Song on holiday will naturally think it’s all like that overseas, and not want anything to do with it.
All of this brings me onto (possibly) the film that is about to dethrone Amores perros as my favourite film of all time not directed by Edgar Wright. I first heard about the Belgian film Young Hearts from a group of French friends who posted about it on social media after it made a bit of a buzz on in Northern Europe last year, and knew I’d inevitably have to see it. And I finally did, at the Curzon Bloomsbury, at the first UK screening of a film that’s steadily been building a tight fanbase for over a year. Indeed, if you’re from Belgium or the surrounding area, you’ve probably already heard of this film, so I might be the last young queer to wax lyrical about it north of Paris. But you’re here now, so off we go.
The directorial debut of Anthony Schatteman, Young Hearts follows the story of Elias, a 14-year-old boy from a small farming town in Northern Belgium whose life changes when he falls in love with Alexander, a boy from Brussels who’s just moved in over the road and joins his friend group. With a bit of dramatic license, it’s essentially Schatteman’s exact story of coming to terms with his own sexuality, to the extent that it was shot in his actual childhood hometown, including his old school. I can’t think it was easy for Anthony to ask a functioning education establishment if he could use it to broadcast the homophobic traumas he experienced under their care to the world, and I doubt Langley Park Boys’ School would be as obliging if I tried to make a UK version. Not least because I’m told they now have an LGBTQ+ society. Lucky Gen Alpha sods.
Essentially, it’s a ‘coming-of-age’ film, but having seen it, I find that far too reductive a label. Not least because nobody really ‘comes of age’: they’re kids, and they remain kids for the duration, we just get to study their characters a bit. Schatteman himself was averse to this genre that has been mistreated by Hollywood so much in the past, but had a change of heart when a 9-year-old boy he was working with on another project asked if he could recommend any queer media for children, because he thought he might like a boy at his school. This put him at a dead end: so many of the breakthrough queer films and TV shows we remember and love the most are definitely not for kids. His first memory of a queer Hollywood film was Brokeback Mountain – far too much rumpy-pumpy. Mine was Call Me By Your Name – if you think you’re showing a 9-year-old Timothée Chalamet wanking into a peach, please think again.
It never occurred to me, until I watched this film, just how many of the conversations I have with my queer friends centre around sex, and references to it. Things like jokingly calling myself a ‘filthy dirty homosexual’ in company, and changing song lyrics to smut. Of course they are – it’s the only way we’ve known how to talk about our sexuality, having grown up in a society where teaching children that some men love men and some women love women is akin to ‘sexualising our children’, but it’s perfectly fine to ask a 3-year-old boy which girl at his nursery is his ‘girlfriend’. Straight love is ‘pure’, ‘natural’, and not sexual unless we make it so; queer love is sexual by default. To quote Jez from Peep Show: ‘who needs romance when you’re doing it up the bum?’. But queerness doesn’t start at 18, and LGBTQ+ kids need the kinds of material that their straight counterparts get in abundance. With this in mind, Schatteman felt it was his duty to pitch this idea to the Belgian film board, and they said yes.
Hang on…a film about two young gay boys in a small town in Belgium? Haven’t we already had this film? Yes, the comparisons to Lukas Dhont’s Close from 2022 are everywhere, probably not a coincidence as the two directors are actually very good friends and helped each other in the casting process. Having seen both of these films, however, despite the same idyllic country views and unironic bike-riding, they could not be more different. At the time, I argued that Close isn’t really a queer film, because none of the characters are explicitly queer. From my reading, it's about two close friends whose unabashed intimacy falls victim to the homophobic power dynamics of secondary school life. It has queer themes, but it’s not a queer story per se. Also (and this is a spoiler for a film released 3 years ago), after one of the friends unalives himself in the first act, the film loses its innocence very quickly, and everything that follows is tinged with an overwhelming sense of gut-wrenching sadness. Anyone who’s aware of his debut film Girl will know Dhont likes to go for the shock factor. Young Hearts is the yin to Close’s yang, the opposite side of the same coin, the story that might have played out if Rémi’s grandad had taken him to the Ardennes for a jolly before he’d decided to end it all.
The other benefit of both main characters staying alive for the duration of the film is that we get to see actual growth and dénouement, as the pair navigates the challenges of being intimate in a society where intimacy between two boys is a curiosity, sexual or not. The reason this film will stick with me for a long time is because of how well it deals with what Schatteman refers to as ‘latent homophobia’: this idea that we are, essentially, conditioned to be straight. Throughout the film, you don’t see a lot of explicit homophobia – there’s a bit where someone vandalises a magazine cover, there’s a bit where Alexander kicks over some boys’ bikes after they shout slurs at him, and there’s nothing else. What really sticks out is the homophobic undertones: the dated culture these kids consume, the idealised versions of straight love through their parents and grandparents they all aspire to at a ridiculously young age, the way one male character says it would be ‘weird’ for him to acknowledge that Alexander is really, really ridiculously good-looking.
At the start of the film, Elias is ‘in a relationship’ with his friend Valerie, but it becomes obvious very quickly he’s not at all into her, and is only agreeing to the rigmarole because it makes his friends and parents happy, and possibly in the hope he’ll ‘properly’ love her one day and grow out of this weird ‘phase’ he’s going through. He says as much to Alexander when they first meet, and it’s a feeling from my youth I was never able to acknowledge at the time. This film jogged so many memories of how I used to react when I even had an inkling of acknowledgement for my romantic feelings towards my own gender. In my school days, any time there was a rumour I liked another girl, mostly brought about by other boys from, say, the way I looked around her at the vending machine to see if they still had the Wispa Golds from the week before, I’d always talk up their prying and add fuel to the hypothetical romantic flame. ‘Is it a ting, Joe?’ ‘I dunno…could be, she’s nice to me in Politics, and everyone else is doing it…just have to see…’ It was obviously never going to happen, but better to feed their laddish thrust than they find out…the truth.
I’d like to wholeheartedly apologise to all female readers on behalf of closeted gay boys from this period: our straight peers were weird and prehistoric, and many still only used ‘gay’ as an insult, the way we all found out about the word’s existence in primary school, so I had little choice. But I’m deeply sorry.
After Elias and Alexander have had their first kiss, played as a very sentimental ‘ducking-out-of-the-rain-into-the-barn’ moment reminiscent of many a coming-of-age Hollywood tale, things really kick into overdrive for Elias, who’s never had these feelings before and is thoroughly confused. Luckily for my repressed trauma, the way he chooses to dampen down this anger is by turning to the good old brewery of the Bromley Youth Concert Band. One of his friends smuggles some of her dad’s beer stash into a campout he’s attended with Valerie, and my god, we like to drink with Elias cos Elias is our mate. And when we drink with Elias, he escapes the clutches of his loving girlfriend, heads to his new sweetheart’s house, wakes him up using that ‘whisper-shout’ we used to do to stop our mates snoring at sleepovers, tries to kiss him again, which Alexander rejects, presumably because he’s barely awake and this div he’s known for less than a week stinks of pub, nips back home, has a quick fight with his brother and a good spew before bed. One thing I’ll say is that kid’s drunk acting is worryingly good, but more on that later.
While I’m aware ‘drinking yourself under the waffle iron’ is not an exclusively queer thing to do, but alcohol played a huge part in how I dealt with, well, everything. A confidence booster, a potency-enhancing drug (ironically), a possibility that, just for the next few hours, you won’t feel like your entire life is falling apart? It’s a wonder nobody died in my youth band days considering how much unmixed Sambuca we used to drink out of water bottles in people’s hotel rooms.
The other scene where the theme of ‘latent homophobia’ really rears its head is possibly one of the best in the film, again, involving Elias, his friends and a bottle. By the second act, Elias has fully entered the denial phase, distancing himself from his family and friends, and rejecting Alexander’s public acts of affection. The perfect time to attend your best mate’s birthday party! And on the runway, category is: ‘Dynamic Film Duos’. Valerie’s (mum) decided that she and Elias will go as Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio, as seen in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, a reference so on-the-nose to tragic fairytale love you can see it from space, and also a reference to the film’s title, given Donna Summer’s song ‘Young Hearts Run Free’ was used in that film. Alexander and his ‘girlfriend’ have come as Harley Quinn and the Joker, specifically the purple-suited Joker from the Batman animated series. You know, the most famous queer-coded panto villain of all time, and the one their parents would be familiar with. It really smacks of just how backwards the setting is, not least the fact these kids’ parents have enough time to sew a half-decent 90s chic knight’s templar outfit for a 14-year-old’s birthday party. Alexander asks Elias if he’s seen the film, he says ‘no’, Alexander replies ‘me neither’. Probably hasn’t seen the Romeo + Juliet scene from Hot Fuzz, either – it was only right it’s referenced in both my favourites.
Anyway, the centrepiece of this scene is when the gang get together to play an old-fashioned game of ‘Spin the Bottle’. It’s Alexander’s turn, and oh, it’s landed on Tom. We’ve got to spin it aga…oh no, they’ve kissed, they’ve actually kissed, and it looks like he enjoyed it. Maybe it’s the drink, maybe it’s the eye contact he gives Elias afterwards, but whatever it is, something in Leonardo flips, and he storms off and has a huge rant about how I’m definitely not a bender, stop thinking I am because he is, the subsequent ‘fuck you’ from the Joker sealing the deal for a moment where Hollywood idealism meets real-world internalised homophobic anger.
There are hints throughout the film that Elias has been bullied long before he met Alexander, notably the magazine vandalism, which happens in the same scene he arrives at school for the first time. And now, in a moment of madness, all those years of anger and resentment have come pouring out of him, and all he can do is run away, in floods of tears, to the safety of his grandad’s farmhouse. To any of the people who were surprised when I came out, all I’ll say is: ask any of my peers who’d talked down to me throughout my school life for doing something they considered to be slightly effeminate, from kicking a ball in the wrong direction to reading a Jacqueline Wilson book. They didn’t actually know I was gay either, but our parameters for masculinity are so narrow and toxic that these kinds of microaggressions are sadly inevitable, and make young queer kids resent themselves for reasons they can’t acknowledge until the bullying has stopped. Alternatively, the opposite side of the same coin is those well-meaning parents who say, when their kids come out to them: ‘well, we kind of knew anyway’, most of the time based on homophobic assumptions about, say, liking the Scissor Sisters or wanting to play with your sister’s dolls, rather than any explicit romantic occurrences. Sorry, but this is hitting a bit too close to home.
With the dark stuff out of the way, this is when the film really starts to serve its maverick purpose in the queer culture canon. Yes, Elias is now sinking further and further into a bottomless pit, and is sent to live away from home with his grandad Fred, played by Dick van Dyck…sorry, Dirk van Dijck, his FIFA counterpart. Upon arrival, he collapses on the bed, and when his grandad asks what he wants, he says ‘I want to die’. Any inclination he’s going to meet a similar fate to Rémi in Close are quickly batted away by his grandfather’s comeback, one of my favourite lines in the film: ‘Okay, if you need me when you’re dead, I’ll be on the terrace’. A quick bit of comic relief to remind you that this film, above all else, has so much heart. Young heart, if you will. Anyway, Big Fred from the Pig Shed, as I like to call him, is, ironically, the older lover who talks Elias around to a semblance of sanity, over a story about how losing his wife, Elias’ grandmother, made him acknowledge that love is something you need to run towards rather than away from, because it can be taken from you in a heartbeat. To speedrun the rest of the film, what follows is a series of events that leads Elias to patch up the damage caused, notably by coming out to his mother, in a scene so unbelievably well done it needs its own section, then finding Alexander and kissing it better, to the surprising affection of his entire family, including his brother and father. The film culminates in the pair riding off into the sunset with their friends, Elias clinging to Alexander tightly in an embrace, and they all lived happily ever after.
There we go – that’s what this film is, and why it’s had such a profound effect on me and so many others. This is our ‘happily ever after’, a gay fairytale that acknowledges the traumas and struggles of growing up queer, but has a happy ending that everyone is okay with, and the main character doesn’t end up dying or heartbroken at lost love, that you can show to your children without fear they’ll lose all faith in everything. Why is this still a vanishingly rare thing in our modern, so-called ‘progressive’ culture? I’m reminded of one of the most well-known academic pieces on queer Hollywood, Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet, and in it, a quote from director Arthur Laurents: “You must pay. You must suffer. […] If you’re a woman who has another woman, you better go hang yourself. […] And certainly, if you’re gay, you have to do real penance – die.” But, as Bob Mortimer eating an Odeon cinema hotdog puts it: “It’s good to be alive!”
We’ve come a long way since all portrayals of LGBTQ+ people in films were through a straight lens, characterised as sadistic psychopaths, mentally-troubled loners or ‘sissies’, but the films we do have still leave young queer people with a sense that their lives will end in either death or heartbreak, whichever comes first. We release a film that celebrates gay identity, only for the homophobic F word to be banded around in films willy-nilly, without the same loaded connotations of the racist N word. We release a film that celebrates trans identity in Una mujer fantástica, and then we get Girl by Lukas Dhont, which reduces the issue to a matter of…well, ‘willy-nilly’.
People will say this film is unrealistic, and people will say there’s no way both his father and grandad would’ve been okay with Elias’ affection for Alexander, not to mention the whole of that remote countryside community. But, to that end, I say…so what? Every other fairytale is unrealistic. Besides, while, as Alexander Avila puts it, in a market economy, like the one we live in today, queerness is an act “defined by private individual consumers, not by a community with separate institutions”, where the aim is seemingly to “integrate with existing power structures” by, for example, fighting for gay marriage and adoption rights rather than championing alternative values, the existence of Young Hearts as an addition to the predominantly straight fairytale teen love story canon can only really be a positive. Maybe it’s not for older gays, who might find it saccharine, but as we’ve discussed, it really isn’t. It doesn’t talk down to its audience, the trauma is there, just in much more subtle ways than what’s come before.
Now, I’ve done nothing but compare Elias’ story to my own life so far, but in truth, it’s not my story to tell. The man who did joined us for a Q&A after the screening at Curzon, and you fall in love with this film even more when you find out about the impact it’s had before it arrived on British shores, for the director, the general public and queer kids all over the world.
One of the first screenings that took place for this film, right after the press premiere at Berlinale last year, was for a room full of secondary school children from all over Berlin. This would be the real test for Schatteman – he admitted to serious nerves going in, given he was about to get the verdict from the film’s intended audience, and Berlin has a large diversity of communities, and with it, opinions on LGBTQ+ people. The organisers purposefully didn’t tell the children what the film was about, and sure enough, at the 20-minute mark, when the first kiss happens, there was notable booing and jeering. However, as the film progressed, the students became more and more engaged, and identified with Elias’ struggles so much that, at the end, the applause was rapturous.
After the screening, one young boy took the mic and said something to the degree of: “Thank you for telling my story”, explaining that he’d been questioning his own sexuality but hadn’t told anyone, especially not his school peers. Frankly, if I were Schatteman, I’d have rested on my laurels there – to have significantly affected the life of just one queer child for the better surely meant everything in the moment. But it didn’t stop there: this film has been subject to screenings in schools across Belgium and Northern Europe over the past year, in much the same way the Netflix series Adolescence was over here in the UK.
One of the reasons, I think, that this film has connected so well with young queer and non-queer audiences alike, even those who might have had prejudices going into the film, is how convincing the lead character is. Schatteman spoke of casting Lou Goossens, who plays Elias, and it’s very easy to see why he did – the clincher was when he asked him about what his biggest fear for the future was, and Lou spoke of losing his older brother, his best friend, who was going to university later that year. He started crying, and soon, the whole room was crying. He’d essentially recreated Henry Thomas’ audition tape for E.T., so it was clear to Schatteman that he’d found the man who’d vicariously tell his story. They even cast his brother in the film, as…Elias’ brother, another subtle level of authenticity that shows the care he’s put into this project.
At the age of 14, Goossens puts in a performance that would rival even the most seasoned adult actors in this role, one that transfixes your gaze and sticks with you on a conscious level. Maybe it has something to do with his hypnotic blue eyes, some of the widest and most beautiful you’ll see in cinema. You feel every emotion: when he cries, when he lashes out, when he’s just staring off into the distance. With such an emotionally-loaded script, it would be easy to over-egg a character like this, but there’s not an element of unnecessary camp or queer coding on the part of the director. On one note, he’s just playing a version of himself, a young boy, who just happens to like another boy. It makes the film as a whole much more relatable to people who didn’t think they fit the socio-cultural bill of what it means to ‘be gay’, or had been trained to mask our authentic selves by the latent homophobia and fear of ‘being girly’ we’d absorbed from an early age.
The moment Goossens really shows how mature he is as an actor is in the coming-out scene itself, which is so difficult to get right in a way that LGBTQ+ people actually identify with. Schatteman shocked the room when he said, essentially, it was done in one take: he explained to Lou, while he was sat in a car with his on-screen mother, brother and grandfather, the scene they were about to film, and gave him carte blanche to do it “how you think it would happen”. He never even told him to cry, it just happened. It’s a difficult but incredibly bittersweet scene to watch, and what gets me is the little smile through the tears Lou gives out the window at the very end, as all the tension he’s been bottling up for months vanishes in an instant.
Schatteman explained that he knew the scene would have the desired effect because of how he reacted: sat in the boot of the car on a 30-degree day in Northern Belgium, as soon as the scene cut, he ran off to the creek at the side of the road for a big cry and an even bigger spew. Because he was filming in his hometown, he was staying with his parents for the duration of the shoot, and when he came home sobbing that night, his mum assumed something had gone wrong with the production, but the glint in his eyes made her realise what scene they’d just filmed. Naturally, because this is all out of the mouth of the director, who is simultaneously trying to satisfy the press and sell his film, you have to take everything with a pinch of salt, but because of the passion with which he talks about all of this, and the glee his mum probably recognised on the day as he recounted the story, you can’t help but take it at face value.
I’d be as bold to compare Goossens’ performance to Owen Cooper in Adolescence, especially given the impact the film has had. Yes, Goossens had a few on-screen gigs prior to Young Hearts, including once, quite aptly, in a glasses advert, and the character of Elias was a far less contentious one to tackle than Cooper’s Manosphere-absorbed, emotionally fragile Jamie Miller, but the comparison of them both being young teenagers, and being the lens through which to tell a timely story of social injustice for a young and old audience alike, including in schools, is definitely a worthy one.
As for Marius De Saeger, who plays Alexander, the main requirement for casting him was finding someone who could speak both Flemish and French, as his character is from Brussels, making for a slightly more classic love story dichotomy between the ‘country’ and ‘city’ boy. A place that Elias’ friends joke is ‘dangerous’ and ‘full of stabbings’ is given a tender moment in the film as a safe haven for Elias, who accompanies Alexander there one day to visit his aunt and uncle, who work at a cabaret venue. Alexander introduces Elias as his ‘petit copain’, the French for ‘boyfriend’, which causes Elias, who doesn’t speak French, to go all Jean Seberg in A bout de souffle on him and ask “qu’est-ce que c’est, ‘petit copain’ ?” This is also the scene we’re introduced to his friend and real-life drag queen La Diva, who performs an acoustic rendition of, wait for it…Sandra Kim’s 1986 Eurovision winning hit J’aime la vie. Because it just wouldn’t be a queer film without a Eurovision reference in there somewhere, repent for it is everywhere and we cannot escape its giant nails and sequins! Anyway, it’s a truly beautiful moment of self-reflection, made all the nicer by the fact the subtitles translate it musically rather than lyrically, to “Crazy, crazy for life” rather than “I love, I love life”, a sign that the team had an international audience in mind.
In general, music serves as a key theme in this film, and another motif to bridge the communities together in understanding. Schatteman comes from a musicals background, and his dream is to remake Sunset Boulevard starring ex-Pussycat Doll and recent Muller Light troll Nicole Shirtswinger. His father, Johan, was also a singer, and the inspiration for Elias’ father in the film, Luk, played by Geert van Rampleberg. We’re introduced to him right from the start, and he’s the sort of old-timey silver fox Bublé-wannabe crooner whose concerts look more like a recording of Countdown, with a back catalogue of cutesy songs about young love that clearly come from a mind that never considered love as something to be feared. It’s yet another reminder that this community, and society at large, hasn’t really progressed since these grannies were kids themselves.
Because Schatteman had based the film on his own life, that threw up some conundrums about how to portray some of the characters who might have been apprehensive at first to his coming out, notably, his brother and father. A lot of queer kids don’t imagine that their siblings might also be bullied for having a gay brother or sister. Schatteman’s father was worried before the film was released that he wouldn’t come out of it looking very good, and yes, for most of it, he’s a complete narcissistic pig. His brother also has some visible hesitation, since he’s present in the car during the coming-out scene. However, both of them have their moment of glory in the penultimate scene, as Luk interrupts his gig to run over and congratulate his son, a moment that has you second-guessing right to the end. The film progresses from the O Sole Mio style of classic love songs that Schatteman’s dad introduced him to, through the classic and enduring queer 80s sound of J’aime la vie, an anthem for one of the largest LGBTQ+ fanbases in the world, to the final scene, when we get a new imagining of attitudes through Elias and Alexander, and with it, a more modern sound. Maksim’s Blote voeten (meaning ‘Bare Feet’) play us out as the main characters ride away, capping the film off with the same sort of defiant youthful joy that Chairlift’s I Belong In Your Arms gave to the end of the first series of Heartstopper, comparisons to which I don’t even need to go into.
Young Hearts came out for general viewing in UK cinemas in early August, but it was dropped on Belgian Netflix a few months back. Schatteman recalls the countless messages he received from parents of queer children who’d watched the film, but one in particular, from the father whose son had recently come out to him, stood out. He said that he’d found it hard to come to terms with this because of his upbringing, but after watching Young Hearts by himself, he finally understood what he was going through, and, much like Elias’ father’s arc in the film, why his attitude needed to change.
This is another reason why to call this a simple ‘coming-of-age’ tale is reductive: it ignores all of this nuance, because as soon as you make a coming-of-age tale a queer story, there are so many more barriers to the eventual happy resolution, and it becomes more of a psychological character study. Now more than ever, those barriers just seem to be piling up even higher: problems we thought were over are rearing their ugly heads in the world again. The never-ending inferno of hate social media has released on the world, combined with a rollback on LGBTQ+ protections from US-based companies trying to appease the White House, the rise of transphobic discourse into the mainstream which has, in turn, reignited a lot of traditional homophobic attack lines, and that’s before we get into the A****w T**e bullshit.
Every time you see a prominent figure burning a rainbow flag and receiving praise for it, it makes the case for this story even stronger. While the script for Young Hearts was being written, a 42-year-old man was murdered by 3 teenagers in a park in East Flanders as part of a honey-trap operation involving the gay dating app Grindr. According to a new YouGov poll, 71% of gay men in the UK actively avoid showing affection in public out of fear of discrimination, and over half feel uncomfortable holding hands in public. Perhaps nothing sums up this creeping prejudice more than Russell T Davies' next big drama project - three decades after Queer as Folk, he'll be returning to Manchester's Canal Street for Tip Toe, named after this line from the main character: "I used to walk into rooms and go, 'ta-daa!' Now I walk on tip toe, in case I get seen."
We are simultaneously living in a world where queer people are still being thrown out of their homes by their elders simply for being who they are, only to be met with similar, and in some cases even worse, attitudes from their younger peers, the very people this film needs to find. When Schatteman screened Young Hearts in Paris, one attendee was a 17-year-old Algerian teenager, who was living in a refuge in the city for queer kids who’d been banished from home. During the Q&A, this boy broke down into tears, and upon Schatteman asking if he was okay, he replied: “I’m fine, I can breathe now.” I dare you to still call it a coming-of-age tale.
Yes, this film on its own will not do a lot to stop homophobia worldwide, that’ll only be achieved by meaningful societal restructure and policy change. But when you hear all the stories about just how this film has affected queer people who’ve seen themselves in Elias, and non-queer people who’ve learned to accept their children, or their friends, you read Instagram comments from people in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, parts of the world where being gay is still punishable by death…it can only be a very positive sign. It’s a non-English language film worthy of everyone’s time and attention, a local yet universal one that I'm very happy to call my new favourite non-comedy film ever. Schatteman reminds us that queerness is not just campery and innuendo like a Christopher Biggins panto, but it's also not just tragedy and death like Romeo and Juliet or Close, that navigating your sexuality is healthy and acceptable whenever you choose to do it, and that family, blood or chosen, has such an important role in overcoming adversity that should never be taken for granted.
The film has also given us its two stars, Lou Goossens and Marius De Saeger, who’ve not only come out of this as a pin-up for multitudes of teenage girls who the film wasn’t aimed at in the first place but still love what it represents, but as beacons for the antithesis to the young people brought up in the shadow of the Manosphere. In interviews, they foster a general presence of: “we may not be gay in real life, but we’re perfectly fine with being vulnerable, even being intimate with another man”. What I’d have given to have grown up in a world where platonic male friendships consisted of a series of emotionless grunts, and weren’t so taboo the second they got a bit feely, where I could hug one of my male peers out of friendship and not get slapped with a sardonic G word. No wonder I was more comfortable being friends with girls for much of my late primary school life – they just did friendship so much better. But men hug better. We definitely have that.
The only other thing I think I’ll say about this film is that I reacted to it in a way a gay autistic man who grew up in 2010s suburbia could. Thanks to my delayed emotional processing and the loud hotdog chomping going on next to me, I didn’t cry watching the film itself. Then I left the cinema into the London summer evening air, found J'aime la vie on Spotify, and wept buckets all the way home. Given it was at the Brunswick Centre, I can’t help but think more than one passer-by wondered why I was so upset Robert Dyas was shut. An institution that’s also given us queer cinema.
When I got home, I whacked on the other piece of LGBTQ+ media from Belgium that gave me unbridled joy a few years ago when I watched it win VRT’s Eurosong in Brussels, Because Of You by Gustaph, a song that definitely wouldn’t have felt out of place in this joyous queer masterpiece. “Remember when they told us you’re not good enough, and then you came into my life, and you changed my world for good? You told me to love myself a bit harder than yesterday – well, life is too short, and we sure got to celebrate…and when the world got me going crazy, I’ll carry on, and it’s all because of you.”
Godspeed to all the Eliases of the world – you’re beautiful and you’re loved. I don't love the cinema, but I loved this film.
Young Hearts is currently screening in the UK and Ireland. Anecdotes in this article were taken from director Anthony Schatteman, who spoke at the Curzon Bloomsbury, 7th August 2025.