{"id":274842,"date":"2025-07-19T13:42:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T13:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/274842\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T13:42:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T13:42:10","slug":"hair-ties-two-men-in-a-delicate-belgian-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/274842\/","title":{"rendered":"Hair Ties Two Men in a Delicate Belgian Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tTo anyone who has lately travelled to Istanbul, it\u2019s a familiar if disconcerting sight. Hordes of men strolling nonchalantly around the city\u2019s tourist spots with their bare scalps stippled, bloodied and sometimes bandaged \u2014 survivors not of a recent zombie apocalypse but any of Turkey\u2019s famously affordable hair transplant clinics. Jokes at their expense are easy and cheap, though each of these ruddy head wounds caps an individual story of insecurity and frail hope for more abundant days ahead. Two of those are told, with tact and care and just a little absurdist wit, in Belgian director Mano\u00ebl Dupont\u2019s delicate miniature \u201cBefore\/After<\/a>,\u201d a film that treats the hair transplant industry with respectful, even journalistic interest, but not as the cure-all that the protagonists would like to believe it is.<\/p>\n

\n\tA standout in this year\u2019s Proxima competition at Karlovy Vary, where it received a special mention from the jury, \u201cBefore\/After\u201d is a brief, unassuming character study with a novel semi-documentary hook: Though the film is mostly scripted fiction, its leads are two non-professional actors undergoing hair transplant surgery themselves, and the procedures and transformations depicted on screen are their own. That lends proceedings a bracing, candid authenticity, as well as unusually heightened human stakes \u2014 the anxieties shown at all stages of the process here are real. <\/p>\n

\n\tThat the film is also a gentle, sensitive portrayal of a fledgling gay relationship could see it gain traction on the LGBT fest and distribution circuit \u2014 it was picked up last month by queer-oriented French sales outfit Outplay Films \u2014 though its articulation of vulnerable modern masculinity is broadly resonant.<\/p>\n

\n\tLate one night, J\u00e9r\u00e9my (J\u00e9r\u00e9my Lamblot) and Baptiste (Baptiste Leclere) meet by chance on the road: The former, hitching a ride home, is picked up by the latter, who\u2019s been living in his car for some time. Small talk leads to a drink at the large house J\u00e9r\u00e9my has inherited from his late father. There\u2019s an evident shy attraction between the two, but the two men, both nearing 30, bond first and foremost over their mutual male pattern baldness. Baptiste, tall and heavy, attempts to compensate for it with straggly shoulder-length locks; the more diminutive J\u00e9r\u00e9my gestures toward his relative youth with diamond stud earrings. Dupont\u2019s writing, crisp and compact and scant on backstory, alludes to deeper damage in each man than their respective thinning pates \u2014 though hair, at least, is one lost thing they feel they can regain.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith one swift cut we\u2019re in Istanbul, where J\u00e9r\u00e9my and Baptiste have booked a cheap hotel room and a series of consultation appointments with hair clinics. It\u2019s not clear quite how much time has passed, though the pair, intimate if not exactly a couple, don\u2019t yet seem to know each other all that well \u2014 the shared ritual of a hair transplant beckons as a gateway to a new life for both. Their concerns look small in a Turkey caught up in 2023\u2019s landmark presidential elections: Shooting on the fly on crowded city streets, Dupont and DP Thibaut Egler capture a sense of communal restlessness that chimes, in its own way, with our protagonists\u2019 nerves and impatience for a new chapter. Partially if not completely playing themselves in curious circumstances, Lamblot and Leclere give lovely, quietly yearning performances, regarding each other with a mixture of timidity and frank need.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe operation, meanwhile, is observed in methodical detail both morbid and tender, as we\u2019re party to the stress of language barriers at crucial points of communication, last-minute jitters over newly drawn hairlines, and the panic of separation when they finally go under the scalpel.\u00a0Togetherness is important to the men in this moment \u2014 \u201cIf we end up with shitty hair, we\u2019ll both be in the same boat,\u201d they agree, oddly romantically \u2014 though what lies ahead for them is uncertain. \u201cA page is turned, I can become a new man,\u201d says J\u00e9r\u00e9my immediately after the operation, while later, he and Baptiste lie nude together, holding each other as mirrors to their supposedly rejuvenated masculine mojo. A gracefully ambiguous final act, however, invites the question of how different you can feel for how long, before you need to do some less cosmetic work on yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To anyone who has lately travelled to Istanbul, it\u2019s a familiar if disconcerting sight. Hordes of men strolling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":274843,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[103964,77,99462,103965,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-274842","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-before-after","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-karlovy-vary-film-festival","11":"tag-manoel-dupont","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114880194104211903","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}