Filmmaker Manoël Dupont’s debut feature Avant/Après premiered in Karlovy Vary’s 2025 Proxima competition and won the FIPRESCI Jury award for its “unfeigned exploration of a relationship as fractured and ambiguous as the cinematic travelogue that captures it.” The film appeals to a canting sensibility, not least for the slash found between the title’s two words—a tension that, like a follicle of hair left to grow, inevitably leans to one side or the other. Actors-as-characters Jérémy (Jérémy Lamblot) and Baptiste (Baptiste Leclere), real-life friends with a theatre background, travel to Turkey for hair transplants, their bond forged through shared insecurity. What begins as cosmetic tourism ends as an open question into whether closeness, too, might be a purchased affair.
As the director has pointed out, cosmetic surgery is often framed by a before and an after —two static images separated by surgical intervention that erase everything in between. Avant/Après is about that brief duration that often eludes documentation.
The journey begins with a camera planted in the back seat of a car, the two characters and their balding heads obscured in darkness. The winding road ahead is lit only by headlights. Jérémy is getting a lift from Baptiste, a man who spends his days and nights in his car. At their destination—Jérémy’s childhood home—an invitation inside is comically illuminated first by a torch, then by a fireplace, as they recognize in each other the physical lack of hair, undefined yearning, and an impulse to change.
For some, a hair transplant might be a last resort. For these characters, bonding occurs through shared dislike—what social science suggests might actually be the faster route to feeling connected with others. An economic imbalance presents: Jérémy, funded by his deceased father’s inheritance, insists on paying for both to travel from familiar Belgian lands to Turkey, hoping to make up for what’s lacking and arrange for better coverage and eventual growth.
Jérémy is loud, with piercing blue eyes, eager for a challenge, yet unwilling to undergo a surgical procedure alone. Baptiste is sensitive and solid, blond and bearded—he cannot move without being seen—and towers over Jérémy’s frame both physically and spiritually, as he claims Jérémy must be in his first incarnation, all while seemingly navigating as Jérémy’s shadow, yielding to indecision and minimizing himself.
Is modern masculinity political or personal? Perhaps in-between, never quite adequate, and susceptible to modification. The exposure of the actors’ and characters’ vulnerability makes the film engrossing in the way watching extraction videos compels—earwax removed, pimples popped, follicles extracted. In contrast—or perhaps as a result of their portrayed dynamic—the characters engage in adolescent-like banter and float around the city, entirely removed from the political atmosphere that is backgrounded, the 2023 Turkish presidential election.
Dupont’s improvised filming tactics differ from those of the filmmaker’s compatriot brother duo, the Dardenne Brothers, who also film from a personal, slice-of-life perspective in a social realist documentary style. Still, the nature of hair transplant surgery, which forced Dupont to film chronologically, implicates the actors themselves, risking juggling multiple elements beyond the film’s control, and may result in a permanent change not guaranteed to succeed. The fiction framework is not interested in pathologizing the necessity or desire for such cosmetic medical surgeries; instead, it takes on a realistic stake headfirst by displaying the medical details— shaved heads, injections, removed follicles, and the grids they are to be placed upon, as well as the bandaged heads and post-surgery care. The two characters are brought together to serve a functional purpose for the duration of the procedure, stumbling through formal bureaucratic procedures that, at one point, prompt the surgical staff to suggest a pricier surgery to ensure permanency.
The door of intimacy is left open in the film as the two characters inch closer together in a moment that diverges from the actors’ real lives as documented and from the characters’ own personal lives, as Jérémy initiates a selfie with Baptiste. What is seen goes no further than the tenderness, exchanged pecks, and the men being physical with one another when expressing care—shaving and shampooing, pre- and post-surgery. While Dupont has expressed in a Cineuropa interview that within these ellipses it should be evident that the two are engaging on a more intimate sexual level with each other, perhaps it is to the film’s benefit that these scenes are not foregrounded, for what we see under the sheets might be of minor importance. The larger exchanges of tenderness and companionship offer a rewarding glimpse into a gentle, fragile masculinity rooted in affection—scenes that are rare between male characters.
The film’s refusal to display more intimate relations allows for a new norm to be established, where men can, irrespective of the level of intimacy in their relationship, display physical acts of affection with the ease of posing for a photo. Yet the film knows this tenderness is temporary, that the “after” returns them to a world that suggests the connection formed might be as temporary as cosmetic surgery itself.
