Xavier Dolan - Waiting on a Masterpiece

Since Quebecois director Xavier Dolan premiered his debut film I Killed My Mother in 2009 at the Cannes Film Festival at the ripe age of 20 he has been labeled the new Enfant Terrible of international cinema. 11 years later his status has not changed much, partly because he has one of those faces that is agelessly boyish, and partly because critics are continuously awaiting his masterpiece, a film which includes all his strokes of genius without falling into music video territory or becoming unintentionally repetitive. Though he is now 31 and a hefty oeuvre under his belt, he still feels like he is maturing. 

There are two obvious themes at the forefront of Dolan’s filmography. The first is his inclusion of LGBT characters and plot points. As a gay man himself, Dolan has a real talent for developing these situations and characters in such a matter of fact way that makes their sexuality seem realistic and natural in a way that possibly gets lost in classic grandiose gay tragedies like Brokeback Mountain, Milk, or 120 Beats per Minute. The second is his obsession with his mother, and, in contrary to the suble touch he has with gay subplots, his love / hate relationship with his mother is sometimes so overblown as to become distracting.

This extreme relationship that is clearly based on his real life relationship with his mother can become exaggerated to a point of almost spoiling his films. Even in I Killed My Mother, a film specifically about the contentious relationship between a mother and her son, the actions of the two of them sometimes become so harsh and out of left field that it is difficult to believe what either of them do in certain circumstances. However, the most egregious mistake of Dolan’s ‘mother problem’ comes in his new film Matthias & Maxime. The film is a beautifully repressed story of two friends who realize their feelings for each other are stronger than they think and how each of them react to this realization - do they accept it, or repress their sexuality even further? The scenes between the two men are devastating, and when they are onscreen the film is fascinating and even thrilling. Yet between all this Dolan could not resist inserting another mother - son subplot that is so dramatic and over the top that it takes away from the main story that is really what interests us.

With this said, his mother roles allow for some real stand out performances for Anne Dorval who has played a title character’s maternal parent in 4 of his films, most spectacularly in Mommy, a film about a single mother with a son with serious behavioral problems trying to get by. Dorval is always excellent even if her character is not necessary (as is the case with Matthias & Maxime), and Mommy is Dolan’s best film about a difficult mother - son relationship. As in many of his films, the melodrama is turned up to 11, but Dolan’s intimate direction and his trust in his actors shine through in a film that is often brilliant and only sometimes frustratingly too much. 

Along with Dorval, Suzanne Clement is another of Dolan’s regulars whose best role is perhaps as Laurence’s partner in Laurence Anyways about a couple trying survive when the man in the relationship, Laurence, comes out as a transgender woman. Lawrence Anyways is a remarkable film in the way it makes the audience feel for both partners in the relationship. We want Laurance to feel comfortable in his new skin. We also want the couple to stay together, though we completely understand Clement’s character’s struggles to deal with this unconventional relationship in a world that is not ready or accepting of gender breaking norms. The characters end up in a Catch 22 where it is impossible for them to be happy in the society we currently live in. Clement’s inner struggle is physically brought to life by her incredible ability to express a range of motions without saying a word. Dolan took particular advantage of this talent of Clement in Mommy where she plays a neighbor friend who has become traumatized to the point of not being able to speak without great difficulty. Clement and Dorval's relationship with Dolan is comparable to the great director - actress combinations in cinema history.

In contrast to some overblown mother - son confrontations, Dolan’s handling of intimate gay storylines is escpecially stirring. A standout case is in his second film, Les Amours Imaginaires. Dolan himself plays one of two people, a man and a woman, who become infatuated with one of their new male friends. We see Dolan’s character early in the film put a tick on his bathroom wall without knowing exactly what he is counting. After a beautifully acted scene where he expresses his feelings for his friend we later learn that each tick stands for every time he has been rejected, perhaps, as in this case, rejected by men who send him confusing signals that seem like flirtatious advances and are then scandalized when he thinks they are gay. This scene is incredibly sad and touching in a silent way that does not feature any of the fireworks present in the mother - son scenes. The lighting, music, and slow motion all come together in a poignant fashion that sometimes goes too far. For all of Dolan’s tendencies to go for it all, in these undramatic personal moments his films show real ‘maturity.’ As the saying goes, sometimes less is more.

Dolan also has a strong style that sometimes gets a bit out of hand. His films are shot with handheld camera work giving his intense dialog scenes a documentary feel, but he also incorporates musical montages that sometimes work better than others. One of his coolest music choices is an Italian version of Nancy Sinatra’s Bang Bang in Les Amours Imaginaires. Though he uses it continuously, perhaps to the point that it becomes redundant, there is something hypnotic about his slow motion scenes of stylish young people walking to the song. Another scene in Matthias & Maxime of friends rocking to a French / English pop song from their childhood is irresistibly catchy and joyful. Yet he also makes decisions that sometimes make you scratch your head such as the use of WonderWall in Mommy that feels more like the choice an 18 year old high schooler would choose instead of a respected cineasta.

With that said, the scene that features WonderWall is at the same time extraordinary because of Dolan’s revolutionary use of framing. The film was shot vertically as if it was made on a smartphone, giving an increased feeling of claustrophobia to scenes that are already intense. However, in the scene where Steve, a teenager who certainly feels trapped in his own head, finally feels free, he opens his arm, a huge smile beaming across his face, and the camera frame opens to the traditional widescreen lens. While it may be a gimmick, it is an incredibly interesting one, and certainly not something that has been done to this extent in many if any other films. If only WonderWall was not playing in the background.

Another minor feature of Dolan’s films are supporting characters of over exaggerated middle aged women. From Dolan’s mother characters themselves, and even more so their loud, laughably over the top friends, to a group of drag queens in Laurence Anyways, these women seem to enter the film from another planet. Sometimes fun, sometimes distracting, one can see a heavy influence from John Waters and Pedro Almodóvar represented in these one dimensional fleeting characters that pass through his films.

One film that stands apart from the aforementioned ones is Tom at the Farm. Made in the middle of Dolan’s filmography, and his strangest film thematically by far, it is an adaptation of the play of the same name. Dolan plays the title character Tom who goes to meet the family of his ex lover after he commits suicide. The film is almost Hitchcockian or Buñuelian in its sense of constant danger and sexual tension between Tom and his ex’s brother, a big violent, manly farmer who Tom fears yet is obsessed by at the same time. It still features his key characters of the controlling mother and a gay protagonist, but the handheld documentary realism is replaced by something more far fetched and sinister.

After the huge success of Mommy, Dolan left his native Quebec to make two very poorly received foreign films, It’s Only the End of the World, and The Life and Death of John F. Donovan made respectively in France and the United States. It seems like his talents did not translate so well working outside of his home country even with help of big name actors such as Vincent Cassel, Marion Cotillard, Lea Seydoux, Kit Haringoton, Natalie Portman, and Susan Sarandon. And there is certainly something special about a director from Quebec making films in his native tongue and accent. He could easily make a career for himself by going south to Hollywood or working in the French music industry where his films have a highly respected reputation in the art world. But, thankfully, after his two international attempts he returned to Quebec to make his most recent film Matthias & Maxime. Some characters mix English slang in as they speak in French, and others are shown speaking English, some with more success than others, showing the reality of the French speaking region of a country many think of as entirely English speaking. His films also show the remarkable talent of Quebecois actors like Dorval and Clement among others, and give them an opportunity to speak in their native language and keep their Quebec accent which is looked down upon as compared to the eloquent and correct French accent from France.

Matthias & Maxime was not only a welcome return to Quebec, but it is also one of his greatest achievements. It contains all the components mentioned above, the good and the bad, but the good is so good that months after seeing it I have almost completely forgotten the bad parts of the film. The heartbreaking relationship between the two titular characters, the silent doomed love of one, and the hateful and hurtful pigheaded denial of the other is so real and so tragic that the scenes often feel like direct punches to the stomach. Gabriel D'Almeida Freitas and Dolan are excellent as the two friends, and their chemistry, love sickness, and repression are palpable. Unlike Laurence, neither of these characters have it in them to accept their feelings or to display them publicly, but like him they were raised in a world where being homosexual was abnormal, strange, and possibly even frowned upon or worse. Matthias is so integrated in his heterosexual life that he has a long term girlfriend, and his sudden forbidden feeling for Max makes him doubt his entire existence, something that he adamantly refuses to do. It certainly is easier for gays today that it was even only a decade ago, but people in their 30s were still raised in a homophobic society, and even nowadays there is still work to be done so people have time to question their sexuality without fear before succumbing blindly to the heterosexual norm in a way that could be potentially catastrophic for someone like Matthias who realizes in his 30s what he has been hiding from himself his whole life.

The film may not be the masterpiece that critics have been waiting for from Dolan, but it certainly is a return to form for the director. Though he has already made 8 films, his works’ energy and spirit still feel so young, making his title of Enfant Terrible still accurate today. While it may take the average director decades to make as many trips to the Cannes Film Festival as Dolan, at 31, he still has plenty of time to continue maturing before delivering his long awaited classic. Matthias & Maxime is the perfect example of a film that is purely his with it’s heartwrenching gay love story, ridiculously unnecessary mother - son subplot, cool music video like moments of a lake and highway, over the top middle aged women from nowhere, and a true sense of place and time in modern day Quebec. It is not perfect, it is beautifully heartfelt at times, and frustratingly overblown in small segments, but, just as critics said with his first film, it has moments of true strokes of genius that seem to signal the coming of a great director.