Elliot Page stars as Sam in Close to You.Mongrel Media
Hollywood, as a macrocosm of the North American film market, toils far behind the path of queer and trans liberation. Hollywood is built on “leveraging queerness,” Canadian actor Elliot Page wrote in his 2023 memoir Pageboy. “Tucking it away when needed, pulling it out when beneficial, while patting themselves on the back. Hollywood doesn’t lead the way, it responds, it follows, slowly and far behind.” Independent films offer a more punctual alternative, with more leeway for artists and their audiences to feel through their identities.
Dominic Savage’s Ontario-set family drama Close to You is one such film. It stars Page as Sam, a trans man visiting his family in Cobourg, Ont., for the first time in nearly five years. He’s apprehensive: Sam hasn’t seen his family since coming out and moving away to Toronto, and he fears they might feign acceptance of his identity while being privately disappointed.
Before arriving at his family home, Sam encounters Katherine (Hillary Baack), a close friend from his teenage years, on the train out of the city. The nature of their relationship is at first opaque, but as past affections gradually filter through, Sam is left to contend with the stretch of his adolescence that drove him out of Cobourg.
Savage and Page developed the story after the pair were introduced by a casting director and found they immediately connected as collaborators. “Our whole process was quick and felt like it was meant to be,” Savage tells me during our interview with Page.
Hillary Baack, left, plays Katherine, a close friend from Sam's teen years.Mongrel Media
There is a melancholic weight to Close to You, which Savage attributes to rigorous realism: “The [visual] choices made are about authenticity to the character. There’s a perfect balance to be made between the aesthetic of something and the realism of it.” The result is a sombre colour palette (which warms in scenes where Sam visits Katherine), intimate close-ups and long, handheld takes that evoke the airless sensation of being in the room with Sam’s family.
Tensions rise as Sam reconnects with his family, who are both infantilizing and vexed at his extended absence. Each of his parents and siblings pull him aside at separate times to ask him if he’s happy, and though he reiterates that he is, they are reluctant to believe it. The conversations mainly fall into two camps: pronoun slippage followed by overt self-reproach by Sam’s mother (Wendy Crewson) and incendiary comments by his smug, cantankerous brother-in-law (David Reale) who maintains that Sam is “going through a thing” and doesn’t want to obey his “rules.”
The deliberately trim plot – a man returns home and reckons with his and others’ memories of his life there – is animated by improvisation, with the bulk of the film being unscripted. “I don’t like to nail the scene down so that it’s predictable,” explains Savage. “I like there to be lots of possibilities within a scene, directions it can go in, and on the day, not quite knowing what’s going to happen. It’s a proper journey.” Instead of dialogue, each scene and its accompanying stakes were roughly outlined, but actors were given freedom to experiment in their environment.
“Working this way, for lack of a better word, is a spiritual experience. You have to be so present and you really see every actor going through their own kind of therapy in these scenes,” says Page, who also served as a producer on Close to You. The actor founded PAGEBOY Productions in 2021 to produce “genre agnostic” works “by and for intentionally marginalized voices to dismantle and redistribute power balances.”
The first seed of Close to You was the brief encounter on the train, which Savage and Page consider the main theme, with the family gathering acting as a counterpoint. Their meeting on the train underscores Sam’s anxieties with a kind of nostalgia and yearning for what can come from reconciling with one’s past. Katherine, herself grappling with their relationship, becomes a beacon for Sam to return to in Cobourg when the family friction becomes untenable.
Though the film is loaded with apprehension, perhaps the most poignant theme is Sam having to persuade his relatives that he is, in fact, happier without them. He expresses contentment with his job and social life in Toronto, though audiences are not privy to this, beyond a brief opening scene in which Sam is reassured by his roommate (Sook-Yin Lee) that he does not have to visit his family if he isn’t ready.
Keeping Sam’s personal life at a distance from the audience was intentional, as Savage did not want the film to feel overly expositional – though they did shoot and discard scenes of Sam at his job. Sam protecting his happiness and the life he built for himself is not only his leverage, but an assurance of his progress since coming out.
“I get asked about trans joy so much and, to me, it’s more of a quiet thing,” says Page, his face lighting up slightly. “It’s the stillness in the present moment. When you see Sam with Katherine, he’s different. He’s more comfortable and in his body, his laugh is different, and they really see each other. It makes me shiver.”