“Matthias and Maxime” ticks almost every checkbox of a Xavier Dolan movie: Canadian slang, which often takes the form of idiomatic English; plentiful shouting and stylized aesthetic flourishes set to synth-heavy soundtrack backing.
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But perhaps truest to Dolan’s form, the film, is a story of a complicated, evolving male friendship and sexual relationship between two friends. One night while hanging out with friends, Maxime (Dolan himself, with a teardrop-shaped birthmark cascading from his right eye) and his childhood friend Matthias (Gabriel D’Almeida Fritas) are dared to star in a short film by a friend’s bratty younger sister, which she defines as an “impressionist but expressionist” rumination on “who really knows.” But when they realize the film involves a kissing scene — a moment that Dolan cleverly elides with a quick jump-cut — a once-latent dimension of their friendship is opened again in myriad uncomfortable ways.
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And after all, they both have their own problems to deal with. Poor Maxime is busy caring for his cantankerous mother, recovering from addiction, who clearly prefers Maxime’s older brother. Meanwhile, Matthias has a new career in a law firm and a girlfriend, to whom he complains that “at a certain point, you outgrow the jokes and the songs.” But with the countdown to Maxime’s impending departure to a two-year stint in Australia steadily ticking down, the pressure between the men to acknowledge the emotional distance between them before a geographic one does first, mounts with every passing day.
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Premiering in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, “Matthias and Maxime” finds Dolan, now 30, trying to shake off the enfant terrible label with a story about the ways we’re still painfully tethered to the people we tell ourselves we’ve outgrown. No matter how desperately Matthias tries to shed immature adolescence for careerism, and no matter how Maxime yearns to flee to another hemisphere, Dolan’s camerawork draws them together again and again, like reluctant magnets.
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With the familiar paintbrush of his signature style, Dolan fleshes out Matthias and Maxime’s world in vivid color, with the proper, credible depth. The film’s dialogue is exceptional — witty and fast-paced and evocative of that specific brand of millennial friendship that’s predicated on amicable derision: “Is eating like a pig part of the hipster-rockstar starter pack?” one friend asks another teasingly, in the film’s opening scene. Though this humor tends to merge the group of friends into a uniform block, rather than a diverse group of individuals, it efficiently establishes the lexicon of these boys’ friendships, relationships that balance fears of emasculation and of disconnection. Occasionally to the tune of Britney Spears, no less.
It’s in this milieu that Matthias and Maxime grapple with their feelings for one another, attraction and repulsion alike. Of the pair, Dolan occasionally obstructs interior access to Matthias, to the extent that his acts of unkindness translate as incomprehensible moral failures, not rational human shortcomings. Dolan attempts to revive some sense of humanity by way of comparison, when Matthias acts as a tour guide for a lawyer visiting from Toronto, whose native language seems to be abrasive jabs and leering, casual misogyny. See? Dolan seems to say, At least Matt isn’t this guy.
It’s true: he’s not. Yet that’s not quite enough, at least not for Maxime, whose life seems to deal one cruelty after another. You get the sense that you’d like to shake Matthias by the shoulders and rail against him for hurting poor Max. That’s precisely what Matt’s girlfriend does, accusing him of selfishness when he elects to skip Max’s going away festivities. “But why is it always me, myself, and Max?” Matthias fires back, exasperated. “It’s because of the fucking film. It was just a bet. I didn’t want to do it.”
Still, these two are meant for each other in some way, even if it’s on some non-romantic level. At least Dolan seems to think so. Even after a final betrayal, conveyed crushingly in a phone conversation, the two reunite in an unresolved, unspoken way. It’s a tender moment in which Dolan implies that it’s not the end for these two. Within a film premised on departure, there’s a touching permanence to be found here: There’ll likely be a thousand fights and disagreements and make-ups to come, but Matthias and Maxime will find their way back to each other, the way they always will. After all, magnets are not driven apart because they are too different. They’re repelled because they are too similar. [B+]