To anybody who has recently travelled to Istanbul, it’s a well-known if disconcerting sight. Hordes of males strolling nonchalantly across the metropolis’s vacationer spots with their naked scalps stippled, bloodied and typically bandaged — survivors not of a current zombie apocalypse however any of Turkey’s famously reasonably priced hair transplant clinics. Jokes at their expense are simple and low cost, although every of those ruddy head wounds caps a person story of insecurity and frail hope for extra considerable days forward. Two of these are advised, with tact and care and just a bit absurdist wit, in Belgian director Manoël Dupont’s delicate miniature “Earlier than/After,” a movie that treats the hair transplant trade with respectful, even journalistic curiosity, however not because the cure-all that the protagonists want to consider it’s.

A standout on this yr’s Proxima competitors at Karlovy Fluctuate, the place it acquired a particular point out from the jury, “Earlier than/After” is a short, unassuming character examine with a novel semi-documentary hook: Although the movie is usually scripted fiction, its leads are two non-professional actors present process hair transplant surgical procedure themselves, and the procedures and transformations depicted on display are their very own. That lends proceedings a bracing, candid authenticity, in addition to unusually heightened human stakes — the anxieties proven in any respect levels of the method listed below are actual.

That the movie can also be a mild, delicate portrayal of a fledgling homosexual relationship may see it acquire traction on the LGBT fest and distribution circuit — it was picked up final month by queer-oriented French gross sales outfit Outplay Movies — although its articulation of weak fashionable masculinity is broadly resonant.

Late one night time, Jérémy (Jérémy Lamblot) and Baptiste (Baptiste Leclere) meet by probability on the highway: The previous, hitching a trip dwelling, is picked up by the latter, who’s been residing in his automotive for a while. Small speak results in a drink on the giant home Jérémy has inherited from his late father. There’s an evident shy attraction between the 2, however the two males, each nearing 30, bond in the beginning over their mutual male sample baldness. Baptiste, tall and heavy, makes an attempt to compensate for it with straggly shoulder-length locks; the extra diminutive Jérémy gestures towards his relative youth with diamond stud earrings. Dupont’s writing, crisp and compact and scant on backstory, alludes to deeper harm in every man than their respective thinning pates — although hair, no less than, is one misplaced factor they really feel they’ll regain.

With one swift lower we’re in Istanbul, the place Jérémy and Baptiste have booked an inexpensive resort room and a sequence of session appointments with hair clinics. It’s not clear fairly how a lot time has handed, although the pair, intimate if not precisely a pair, don’t but appear to know one another all that effectively — the shared ritual of a hair transplant beckons as a gateway to a brand new life for each. Their considerations look small in a Turkey caught up in 2023’s landmark presidential elections: Taking pictures on the fly on crowded metropolis streets, Dupont and DP Thibaut Egler seize a way of communal restlessness that chimes, in its personal approach, with our protagonists’ nerves and impatience for a brand new chapter. Partially if not fully enjoying themselves in curious circumstances, Lamblot and Leclere give pretty, quietly craving performances, relating to one another with a mix of timidity and frank want.

The operation, in the meantime, is noticed in methodical element each morbid and tender, as we’re celebration to the stress of language boundaries at essential factors of communication, last-minute jitters over newly drawn hairlines, and the panic of separation once they lastly go beneath the scalpel. Togetherness is necessary to the boys on this second — “If we find yourself with shitty hair, we’ll each be in the identical boat,” they agree, oddly romantically — although what lies forward for them is unsure. “A web page is turned, I can turn out to be a brand new man,” says Jérémy instantly after the operation, whereas later, he and Baptiste lie nude collectively, holding one another as mirrors to their supposedly rejuvenated masculine mojo. A gracefully ambiguous ultimate act, nevertheless, invitations the query of how totally different you possibly can really feel for the way lengthy, earlier than you’ll want to do some much less beauty work on your self.