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Critics reviews

CLOSENESS

Kantemir Balagov Russia, 2017
It’s a difficult film, erratic in shape and exhausting in its sensory intensity; however, thanks to the sheer force and precision of Balagov’s direction, it’s never anything short of transfixing.
April 3, 2018
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The New York Times
Austere, intense, claustrophobic and shot through with brilliance. . . . The director Kantemir Balagov crams his frame with people — a celebratory dinner is a bravura example of his use of cinematic space — a choice that captures the existential push and pull of identity.
March 27, 2018
The film is dense, often moving, very successfully conducted. But after an hour, it freezes entirely. . . . In retrospect, it seems incredibly bold from first-time director Kantemir Balagov to have bet that we would still be able to care about the problems of his fictional characters after having been reminded so vividly of the horrors of history.
February 13, 2018
Balagov, who studied under his coproducer, Aleksandr Sokurov (though their styles differ), has picked a fresh milieu, a vivacious character and an actress with verve, and proves he has an eye for dynamic framing (maybe even too meticulous, but it gets our attention). The film has already earned him plaudits in French papers (and the French seal of approval: a comparison to James Gray). All that remains is to see what he and Zhovner do next.
July 3, 2017
Whatever the attitude we may take to this incursion of reality into the fictional world of Closeness, the assuredness of the performances and the brooding mobility of the camerawork signal Balagov as a filmmaker with significant promise.
June 22, 2017
Balagov's technique is dazzling: This had more moments of pure cinematic rapture than almost any other film at Cannes this year.
June 2, 2017
It's a tough-minded, rigorously composed, quite brilliantly acted story of the challenges of everyday religious prejudice and ethnic divides in the bleak heart of Russia's North Caucasus, and in many ways Balagov's uncompromising but stylized social realism rewards as much as it punishes. But in including this real video — essentially a snuff movie — within a fiction narrative and not announcing it as such, a line is crossed.
May 30, 2017
Tesnota (Closeness) is the first feature by Kantemir Balagov, a young director who studied under Alexander Sokurov in Nalchik, in the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, north of Georgia. The film doesn't feel remotely like Sokurov, being nearer in its claustrophobic visual style and its dramatic concentration to the Dardennes. But Balagov, especially in his exploration of family dynamics and in his stylized use of color, establishes a signature very much his own.
May 26, 2017
Alternately tender and brutal, Balagov's is a film filled with ugliness and beauty, often all at once—the stuff of life, in other words. History melds into memory, absorbed into the expansive landscapes that bookend the film, and the greater fabric of a family's existence. "I don't know what happened to these people after that," says the closing narration. It's a testament to Closeness that that is more than enough.
May 26, 2017