Xavier Dolan

Matthias & Maxime (2019)

André Crous

In Matthias & Maxime, Xavier Dolan continues his downward trajectory by choosing to keep his two titular characters apart for almost the entire film.

Matthias & MaximeCanada
3*

Director:
Xavier Dolan
Screenwriter:
Xavier Dolan
Director of Photography:
André Turpin

Running time: 120 minutes

We know the drill: Two straight best friends – more specifically, two guys, stuck somewhere between graduation and responsible adulthood – kiss, and the moment changes their lives forever. At times, Xavier Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime is marginally more nuanced than that, but the nuance is actually just long stretches of inertia separated by spasmodic revelations.

As it happens, the kiss is not of their own choosing but merely a result of them agreeing to appear as actors in a short film project about identity. The small-statured, tattooed Maxime (“Max”) volunteers, while his smouldering best friend, Matthias (“Matt”), has to be pressured into accepting the challenge, which he does because of their decades-long friendship. Although initially horrified at the idea of kissing each other (especially because of unverified whispers that this is may not be the first time), the two friends eventually man up and lock lips, which is so momentous the screen turns black.

Almost immediately, Matt has an identity crisis that he takes the entire film to work through. Unfortunately, for the duration of the plot, he appears to be in the closet, emphatically in denial while repeatedly staring at every half-sexy guy moving through his line of sight but without showing any sign of development. Max’s focus is elsewhere. He is about to move to Australia to run away from his problems, the most urgent of which is his mentally ill mother (played to perfection, as usual, with seething resentment and no shortage of verbal abuse by Anne Dorval), but gradually we come to realise he is likely running away because of his sexuality, too. One mesmerising scene with Max on a public bus reveals exactly what we were hoping to learn but then fails to build on this discovery in any meaningful way.

Matthias & Maxime tips its hand early on when Matt’s boss at his law firm, hinting at an upcoming promotion, suggests that many people may be used to doing one thing before discovering much later that they enjoy doing something different. In fact, despite our initial impressions, the kiss did not reveal unexpected inner emotions to the two men but was an expression of feelings they had been struggling with and suppressed for their entire lives, as the film’s final act – and, specifically, a very powerful scene at the house of Matt’s mother, portrayed to emotional perfection by Michelin Bernard – makes so poignantly clear.

And yet, the narrative structure here inhibits (and even undermines) our sympathy in at least two important ways. Firstly, unlike the similar examples of Y Tu Mamá También or Humpday, the kiss comes not towards the end but right at the beginning. This means we don’t know how things were before, and therefore, there is no opportunity for involvement in the awkwardness that follows the physical encounter. This is equivalent to providing a climax without any dramatic build-up.

Secondly, and even worse, the film then proceeds to keep Matt and Max apart for around a full hour. They do not discuss what happened, they do not tell each other (or us) how they feel or what they think, and there is no possibility of a resolution until a brief moment of in vino veritas followed by a narratively contrived final shot and a cut to the end credits. The only thread connecting them for most of the film is their timidity to address this quandary over their friendship and their similar domestic situations: In both households, the only parent around is the mother. 

Despite the amount of dialogue and the admirable delivery by the entire cast, we don’t get close to either of the two M’s. An elaborately staged scene in which Matt tries to rid himself of his existential demons by swimming across an entire lake, getting lost, then swimming back, is mind-numbing because it takes forever, the shots are uninspired, the piano music is monotonous, and we don’t know Matt well enough (or at all) to sympathise with this sudden bout of sexually motivated hysteria.

A film like Marco Berger’s exquisitely paced Hawaii, which focused its energy exclusively on fleshing out its two characters, slowly increased the sexual tension until the point of satisfying release. By contrast, Matthias & Maxime opens with bad foreplay, proceeds straight to the climax and then languishes for more than an hour in a painful refractory period. 

An inordinate amount of time is spent treading water. Throughout the film, Dolan is much more interested in presenting life around the characters rather than focusing on their own lives and inner turmoil. And yet, Matthias & Maxime is at its most captivating when the two titular characters are in the same scene. Max, whose crimson birthmark flows from his right eye across his cheek, is infinitely more interesting than his friend, but despite Dolan playing the role himself, he struggles with the same passivity that hampers Matt’s character from ever becoming more than pitiful. Unspoken desire can be a powerful driver for a story, but at some point, people have to start speaking, and Dolan inexplicably does all he can to avoid this critically important moment.

For all the talk of this Canadian director’s talent, two films continue to stand head and shoulders above the rest in Xavier Dolan’s career: His début feature film as director, I Killed My Mother, released in 2009, showed him at his most creative. And in 2014’s Mommy he reached the zenith of his storytelling prowess with an intimate story told as if it were an epic. But his films since then have been disappointing. Despite its wonderfully recreated tension, It’s Only the End of the World was an annoying powder keg of a chamber drama with another incredibly passive central character. And his subsequent short-lived foray into English-language filmmaking, in the form of The Death & Life of John F. Donovan, produced little more than a full-length dark-toned flashback.

Matthias & Maxime is not unlike Matt himself: While handsome to look at and intent on speaking correctly (Matt’s insistence on using correct grammar is reminiscent of the early films of both Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and the screenplay’s own dialogue is flawless), it prefers limbo over taking things to their logical conclusion. 

Viewed at the 2019 Mezipatra Queer Film Festival.

Tom at the Farm (2013)

André Crous

Tom at the FarmCanada/France
3*

Director:
Xavier Dolan
Screenwriter:
Xavier Dolan
Michel Marc Bouchard
Director of Photography:
André Turpin

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Tom à la ferme

Xavier Dolan is an immensely gifted filmmaker. His début, I Killed My Mother (J’ai tué ma mère), was experimental, visually stunning and inventive, and it had a grasp of rhythm that belied his age — he was 20 years old when it screened in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2009. Most importantly, it suggested a voice all its own with little recourse to the works of other filmmakers, even if one of the best sequences in the film was very similar to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (le Mystère de Picasso).

But his follow-up, Heartbeats, was infused with slow-motion and repetitive music immediately recognisable as being inspired by Wong Kar-Wai. And his third film, Laurence Anyways, about a man who wishes to transition to a female body, had images that brought to mind the perfectly framed visuals of Stanley Kubrick.

Now comes the Hitchcockian Tom at the Farm, in which a young man is virtually held hostage on a farm by the older, homophobic brother of his late boyfriend. But things are not quite as they seem, and the significance of all of Dolan’s personal touches to the narrative are outweighed by the heavy-handed use of Gabriel Yared’s bombastic music that liberally borrows from Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Vertigo and Psycho, in other words: Be prepared to hear a lot of strings played very loudly.

It is a real shame, because Dolan’s story has a lot to work with at the outset. Main character Tom (Dolan) drives to a farm deep in rural Quebec that he clearly has never visited before. He is anxious and upset, and when he arrives at the lonely farmhouse, covered in fog, no one is home. He finds a key on the front porch and enters, but not before we notice the passenger door on his black Volvo is a different colour, obviously recently replaced.

Inside, Tom falls asleep on the kitchen table and is awoken by the elderly woman of the house, Agathe (Lise Roy), asking him what he is doing in her house. Tom was the boyfriend of her late son, Guillaume, whose funeral is the next day. But Tom dare not say anything to her, especially when her eldest son (whom Guillaume, bizarrely, had never mentioned) grabs him during the night and tells him how he will behave if he cares about his own survival, or something like that.

This scene with the brother, whose face is obscured at first and then revealed in a loving close-up as the handsome, bearded Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), is unmistakably homoerotic. But what Dolan wishes to accomplish is far from obvious. The audience will almost certainly expect, because of this confrontation in the dark and many other ambiguous moments, that Tom and Francis will end up together. That is not exactly the case, although because of his physical resemblance to his later brother, Tom forms an attachment to him, and because of Tom’s presence on the otherwise deserted farm, Francis grows closer to him, too. All the while, he continues to bully Tom into fabricating stories about Guillaume’s supposed girlfriend back home in Montreal, which will engender enormous frustration in anyone who values equality and rejects discrimination.

We are taken on wild goose chases, as Dolan seems to suggest Francis is on the verge of revealing some big secret to him before the moment evaporates and we are left with nothing but our imagination. In one bizarre scene, Francis snorts some cocaine and decides to start dancing with Tom in the shed. This is one of the most sexual scenes in the film, but as with all the others, it seems to come out of nowhere and ultimately confuses us more than it answers any questions. Tom’s reluctance to ask some of these basic questions, including the reason for the entire town being openly hostile to Francis, also leaves us shaking our heads.

The worst, however, is a chance encounter right at the end that is almost too ridiculous to stomach and has us wondering how on earth Dolan thought he could get away with having a scene that is so implausible because it neatly ties up a story from an earlier monologue.

Tom at the Farm has some beautiful scenes, and Dolan’s face keeps our interest even when the shots tend to drag on for a very long time, but the film lacks the humour of Hitchcock and the claustrophobia of Polanski to turn his material into gold.

I Killed My Mother (2009)

André Crous

J'ai tue ma mereCanada
4*

Director:
Xavier Dolan
Screenwriter:
Xavier Dolan
Director of Photography:
Stéphanie Weber-Biron

Running time: 96 minutes

Original title: J’ai tué ma mère

If Antoine Doinel was bipolar and gay, perhaps his story would have looked a little like that of Hubert Minel.

His French counterpart — and particularly his actions in Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) —  is indirectly referenced at many turns in the film, the interview with a psychologist in Truffaut’s film here becoming a self-shot black-and-white confessional that is repeated throughout.

Hubert is in his late teens and lives with his mother, whom he obviously despises. Over time, we get the impression this is not just everyday conflict between a teenager and his parent(s), but Hubert has other issues, some related to him not having told his mother he is gay, others perhaps having more to do with his mental health.

This début film of Dolan, who plays Hubert and was only 19 years old when he directed this self-written screenplay in the autumn of 2008, is as artistic as it is intense. The mother-son couple spend much of their time either engaged in passive-aggressive interaction or screaming at each other (sometimes Dolan starts speaking and doesn’t stop, while the camera stays on him for an extended period of time), but while the mother, played by television actress Anne Dorval, often tries to shrug her shoulders at her child’s behaviour, the petulant Hubert goes from one extreme to the other in hopes of manipulating his mother into letting him do his own thing.

That approach is not bearing much fruit, and one day at school when he receives an assignment to question his mother about the family’s financial situation, he tells the teacher his mother has died. This is a line taken directly from Truffaut’s directorial début, The 400 Blows, which was also about a single child, although Truffaut’s Antoine had a much friendlier school environment.

Dolan’s use of his camera is striking, although there are moments when it crosses the threshold of pretension, as in his character’s supposedly self-shot confessional tapes — which nonetheless are not entirely static, proving someone else was behind the lens — which have his face cut off at the nose, showing us only his bottom half of his face, sometimes for an extended period of time.

What is truly amazing to watch is the one scene of intimacy, which takes place one day when Hubert and his boyfriend Antonin go to paint Antonin’s mother’s office by dripping paint on the walls à la Jackson Pollock. Noir désir’s “Vive la Fête” pulses on the soundtrack while the scene itself is constructed in many parts that include close-ups of paint added in many colours onto the wall, dripping, running from top to bottom in various patterns, shots of Hubert and Antonin eagerly throwing paint on the wall, a beautiful close-up of the colourful cans of paint, shot vertically from above, and ultimately the action of the two boys making out and having sex, their arms stained in different colours, sometimes accelerated, sometimes slowed down.

 The jump cuts of the paint dripping down the walls are reminiscent of Clouzot’s Le mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso), in which the master’s artwork grows in front of our eyes from one separate artwork to the next. But Dolan, not interested in the final product, has his eye on the beautiful, artistic mobility of the paint in motion.

The transition between scenes is where the pretension sometimes sneaks in to fragment the film into more pieces than necessary, given the division established early on between scenes taking place in black-and-white and colour, respectively. Shots without any motion, a kind of photographic still life,  are inserted instead of a cut or a dissolve in order to add rhythm where none is actually needed, even though the exercise of creating motion with static images is admittedly fundamental to the cinematic art form.

Dolan’s sense for visual creativity, thinking outside the box, is breathtaking, from adding text onscreen instead of cutting to a close-up or a voice-over, to using a deliberate continuity error (faux raccord) when he puts a cigarette in his mouth in his bedroom before we cut to his face and he is in black-and-white — confessing in the bathroom that the doesn’t love his mother the way a son should love his mother.

He also makes the world his own, not unlike Tarantino, by actually changing the opening quotation from the original. Even before the opening credits, we see a quotation from Guy de Maupassant, from his novel Fort comme la mort (Strong as Death), from which he excises Maupassant’s contention that love for one’s mother is as natural as it is to live, and he changes “on ne s’aperçoit de toute la profondeur des racines de cet amour qu’au moment de la séparation dernière” to “on ne prend conscience de toute la profondeur des racines de cet amour qu’au moment de la séparation dernière.” The change is subtle and doesn’t change the meaning to any degree, but it is interesting nonetheless and suggests that Dolan, while respecting the conventions (many other authors, from de Musset to Choderlos de Laclos, are cited throughout the film by means of their works), also allows himself to make them his own.

But while the relationship at first seems toxic, unsalvageable, we slowly recognise that Dolan focuses on some particularly hurtful moments for the mother, and treats them with the respect they deserve. What is equally interesting is the framing of the two individuals: Whether in the car or at the dinner table, they are very often framed in a two-shot, sitting next to each other instead of opposite each other. While this pretends they are on the same level, equally vulnerable to our gaze, it also shows they are not making eye contact and therefore communication is obstructed.

Hubert’s confessions about his feelings and his mother’s true feelings about her situation, whether silently whispered to herself or in a moment of unleashing pent-up anger of years over the phone, we get a good sense for both of these characters and learn to accept the difficulty they face getting to know and accept each other. In this way, Dolan shows an acute sense for both showing us the many sides of his characters and giving human drama a human face and makes his entry onto the world stage with elegance and insight.