Antoine Olivier Pilon as Steve in Xavier Dolan’s Mommy
I’ve been a fan of the young Quebecois director Xavier Dolan since the 2010 Rotterdam film festival, when I saw his debut feature, I Killed My Mother, in French without English subtitles. I only understood a bit of the dialogue but was taken with its unapologetic ambition, its queer style, its unabashed passion. His four films since confirmed the appeal. So I was chuffed when Sight & Sound asked me to interview Dolan about his latest feature, Mommy, and wrote a piece touching on his use of domestic powerplay, exuberant aestheticism, lustful violence and of course his recurring obsession, mother love. When better to post the article (with Sight & Sound’s permission) than Mother’s Day?
All about my mother
Xavier Dolan’s first film, ‘I Killed My Mother’, was an autobiographical cri de coeur against the woman who had borne him. Five years on, the prolific director’s fifth feature ‘Mommy’ finally offers the mother figure the chance to gain her revenge. By Ben Walters
Wunderkind is an overused word but Xavier Dolan has made a lot of impressive work at a very young age. The French-Canadian filmmaker turns 26 in March, the month that sees the UK release of Mommy, his fifth feature in five years; he shortly begins shooting his Hollywood-set English-language debut, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan.
As well as taking writing, producing and directing credits on all his features, Dolan edits, oversees wardrobe and music choices, and often stars. He even handles the English subtitles himself. Already an established Cannes darling – Mommy won the Jury Prize there last year – his shelf is groaning with more than 30 other international awards. As a child actor, he had a head start in the industry but it’s a rare achievement nonetheless.
In Dolan’s films, fraught domestic relationships are anatomised with expressionistic flair. “They’re very intense movies with intense characters shouting at each other,” as he puts it when we meet in London to discuss Mommy. In the film, Anne Dorval stars as Die, a savvy working-class widow in Quebec struggling to deal with her loveable but disruptive 15-year-old son Steve (Antoine Olivier Pilon) following his release from a detention centre. Suzanne Clément plays Kyla, the withdrawn teacher across the street with whom the precarious pair establish a kind of improvised family unit.
The film has been hailed as a breakthrough for Dolan, a step back from the formal exuberance that has enchanted many, and alienated others, in favour of a more naturalistic approach. “I’ve changed,” he says. “Not fundamentally. The themes are the same: mother love, suburbanite lifestyle, musical episodes of freedom. That modus operandi has not changed.”
So what has? “The use of cinematic effects like slow motion. Mommy was about giving full control to the characters. Every artistic choice, every lens we’re going to choose, every movement was about, ‘Are we upstaging the character? Are we overshadowing, are we mocking, are we disrespecting the character?’ It was always about the character.”
In this respect, and others, Mommy is less a departure from Dolan’s earlier work than a development. There are obvious narrative links to his 2009 debut, I Killed My Mother (J’ai tué ma mère), in which Dolan himself plays Hubert, a gay 16-year-old at loggerheads with his single mother but supported by a teacher, played by Dorval and Clément respectively. The new film’s triangular dynamic recalls Heartbeats (Les Amours imaginaires, 2010), in which two friends (Dolan’s Frank and Monia Chokri’s Marie) jostle for the affections of narcissistic newcomer Nico (Niels Schneider).
Mommy develops a curiosity about aspect ratio first explored in the quasi-operatic Laurence Anyways (2012), which traces the relationship between lovers Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) and Fred (Clément) over the decade during which Laurence transitions from male to female. And it follows Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme, 2013) – a Hitchcockian thriller starring Dolan as an urbanite who finds himself marooned at his late lover’s family farm – in embracing a leaner, less flamboyant mise en scène.
Mommy’s most outré element might be narrative rather than formal. Thanks to a fictional law introduced in the film’s otherwise realistic version of Canada, parents enjoy the “moral and legal right” simply to deposit an unruly child at a hospital. This no-strings solution to the challenges of childcare serves as more than a plot device. As a more or less absurd simplification of the vicissitudes of familial obligation, it throws into contrast the real and intractable dilemma that underpins each of Dolan’s pictures: how can people with conflicting emotional needs love each other?
“All the movies are about that,” the director says. “Tom at the Farm is about how people can love each other under the same roof, Heartbeats is about how people can love each other in a triangular dynamic and Laurence Anyways is about how people can love each other over the course of time.” Solutions are not necessarily proposed: sometimes all that is left to do is be silent together, acknowledging the impasse.
Most fraught of all is the bond between mother and son – a dynamic found in all of Dolan’s films, and dominating I Killed My Mother and Mommy. “Back in the days of I Killed My Mother, I felt like I wanted to punish my mom,” Dolan has written. “Only five years have passed ever since, and I believe that, through Mommy, I’m now seeking her revenge.” He has spoken of his difficult relationship with his own mother and resentment that his juvenile acting career was disrupted when he, like Hubert, was sent away to boarding school.
“You have no idea how close Hubert is to me,” Dolan says. Still, he was dismayed when some used the character’s petulance as a stick with which to beat the precocious filmmaker. “I think people still have a problem with me because they associate me with the first thing they saw me in,” he says, “which is that brat on screen with that awful hair-do.” Mommy, he insists, is “diametrically opposed” to I Killed My Mother: rather than a tongue-in-cheek diary of bourgeois adolescent vexation, this is the story of a disadvantaged woman struggling to cope with a mentally ill teenager. “One is a sentimental comedy and the other is a family drama,” he insists. “It’s socially engaged and an existential crisis.”
What the films share, along with all Dolan’s stories, is a willingness to embrace his characters’ ambivalence. Whatever the set-up, they are rarely simply sympathetic or unsympathetic: Hubert is shrewd and sensitive as well as being a brat while his mother is patient and loving as well as flighty and thoughtless; in Mommy, Steve is racist and violent as well as charming and hopeful while Die is both determined and out of her depth.
Still, it’s true that mothers tend to be resilient and fierce while fathers are feckless or useless, if not absent or dead. And the nuclear family, when glimpsed, is a site of frustration: both Mommy’s Kyla and Laurence Anyways’ Fred chafe at the banality of life with a husband and child. Fred – the one character in Dolan’s films whom we witness becoming a mother – is an intriguing case study in familial ambivalence. “I love you more than my son,” she tells Laurence, yet also reports “thinking about my son 24/7”. One wonders how the child feels about it all.
Recognising domestic powerplay as the basic register of Dolan’s pictures is helpful when considering the swooning aestheticism for which he is known. Opinion is divided but I’m a believer. Sure, there’s a sense of the adolescent scrapbook in the films’ carefully collated objets and icons: this tigerskin lamp, that floral plate, those posters of James Dean, Audrey Hepburn and the Mona Lisa, or evocations of Jean Cocteau and Pedro Almodóvar, Gus Van Sant and Wong Kar Wai, Pierre et Gilles and Jules et Jim.
Why not revel in the exquisitely considered decor and palette, the elegantly poised compositions, the luxuriant slow motion in which characters stride, dance or brawl, or the expressionistically inserted deluges of water, laundry or marshmallows?
It’s not, however, only a matter of taste for taste’s sake. This aestheticism does important character work in these worlds of tightly bound domesticity. Fights frequently erupt in the confines of kitchens or cars but when Hubert and his mother both ‘get’ that tigerskin lamp, we feel there might be hope for them after all. There’s a consoling degree of control in the regimented ritual of taking tea, or placing a pleasing book in just the right spot.
This tendency is strongest in matters sartorial: clothes are a language here. When, in Heartbeats, Frank and Marie arrive at Nico’s birthday party in achingly stylish ensembles, their shared taste and mutual rivalry tell us they have far more in common with one another than with the object of their vain affections or his slovenly friends. It sets them apart – but makes them absurd as well as chic.
“Take a movie like Heartbeats, whose mandate is purely artificial,” Dolan says. “People wrote, ‘There’s a problem. It’s a case of style over substance.’ It’s a movie about style over substance. It doesn’t mean that each scene shouldn’t lose about ten seconds – each of them, all through the movie – but still…”
So yes, it’s possible to use decor and costume thoughtfully and still take it a bit far. In the case of Laurence Anyways, the result is not just indulgent but troubling: the film risks presenting transgender experience as essentially superficial, or at least externally focused. Laurence accuses an interlocutor of failing to look her in the eye but the film itself shows limited interest in the lived reality of transgender experience.
Its focus is on Laurence’s relationship to hair and clothes, loved ones and employers rather than the transformation of the character’s psychological subjectivity or physical person. The new queer family that takes Laurence under its wing, meanwhile, seems less like a group of characters than an excuse for exuberant visual arrangements. Gender identity here ultimately feels like a device put to the service of a story that’s really about becoming – Laurence’s transition from male to female is less convincing than her move from teacher to poet, employee to artist.
Tom at the Farm recoils in the opposite direction, offering a fascinating case study in inverted sartorialism: Tom’s shucking of his stylish city duds for hand-me-down farmwear marks the start of a disturbing loss of personal identity. The change is analogous to the film’s own pared-down style: compared with its peacocking predecessors, it embraces the simpler, more robust form of the thriller. Similarly, the effervescent electro and New Romantic-heavy soundtracks of the earlier features give way to Gabriel Yared’s brilliantly Herrmannesque score.
The sense of domestic entrapment that troubles all of Dolan’s films metastasises here into a literal struggle for survival in which the consolations of taste are of limited use: if Dolan’s earlier films deployed aestheticism as a bulwark against humiliation, here it is brushed aside by naked violence.
This too is a development rather than a departure. Violence is always present in Dolan’s pictures, sometimes visited upon protagonists from outside but more often, and more powerfully, unleashed as an ugly extension of the needful dynamic between loved ones. “I know that violence,” Dolan says. “I know that rage. I have it in me. When I was five, six, seven, eight, I had these great outbursts. I would get into fights with other kids in the schoolyard and gratuitously hit them and it was problematic. Then it became latent and now I guess I’ve decided to express violence through movies.”
Tom at the Farm goes further than its predecessors in melding the violent and the erotic: Tom’s interaction with his late lover’s brother Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) is a sadomasochistic courtship, a tangled tango of lust and loss. “Harder,” Tom gasps as Francis’s fingers close on his throat. “You’re the boss,” Francis pants.
During this scene, the film’s aspect ratio narrows to a tight letterbox for a couple of minutes, as it does at two other points during which the pair’s interaction reaches a pitch of heightened animal intensity. This wasn’t Dolan’s first experiment with expressive aspect ratio: Laurence Anyways was shot in 4:3, befitting the story’s 1980s setting; and, around the same time, Dolan shot ‘College Boy’, a music video for the band Indochine, in an almost square ratio. Dolan would use the same format for Mommy (and cast the video’s star – Antoine Olivier Pilon, who had briefly appeared in Laurence Anyways – as Steve).
To Dolan, the 1:1 look conveys both constriction and heroism, and affords an opportunity for diegetic fun. Just as Steve is able to press play on his stereo and select Mommy’s soundtrack of Oasis, Céline Dion and Counting Crows, at his most optimistic he’s able to reach his hands out and stretch the picture’s square ratio into widescreen. It’s exhilarating but it doesn’t last long.
This moment aside, Mommy is short on conspicuous aestheticism. Dolan says he wants to make sure his formal choices are more reflective of his characters’ experience. “I certainly ask myself more questions,” he says. “I’m trying to slowly drift towards a style which is story-telling first and foremost – storytelling through characters and actors. And I’m quite happy with that because my passion is acting.”
Acting, after all, was how Dolan’s first came to the industry – as a child on set, “missing school and hanging out with adults who talked about their sex lives and crack addiction,” as he once put it – and he still takes roles in others’ projects. It’s fitting, then, that his next picture is about actors.
In The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, Kit Harington (Games of Thrones’ Jon Snow) plays a Hollywood star whose correspondence with an 11-year-old actor is seized on by a malicious journalist (Jessica Chastain) to the consternation of Donovan’s cagey mother (Susan Sarandon), his protective agent (Kathy Bates) and the boy’s concerned mother. The story allows Dolan to explore the emotions of fandom, the mechanics of the film industry and the effects of sudden youthful success. And the cast includes not one but three mother figures.
Mommy is out in the UK on March 26.
