Xavier Dolan might be, at heart, our Millennial Melodramatist. With multiple premieres at the Cannes Film Festival, including two Jury Prize Award wins, a keen eye on mothers and sons, and an expressionistic approach to queer desire, there’s an inherent selfishness to the director’s filmography that augments and texturizes each film and gives it a distinctive feeling, even if he (knowingly) cribs images and ideas from film history. His perspective on identity and what it is to be thrown in a chaotic, sometimes hostile world seems informed by economic crisis, evolution in understanding sexual and gender identity, and a fundamental feeling of displacement in the world.
Dolan may be so fluent in the language of Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar-Wai, and Douglas Sirk that he can playfully mimic them, but the filmmaker’s point of view is unique precisely because of his proximity to the generation to which he belongs: his characters — mothers and sons, lovers and friends, the self-documenting and the self-loathing — are fascinating because of how they orient themselves around the idea of themselves and the desire to reach out and find intimacy with others. His work is about wanting to know and to be known and the difficulty to express that, in spite of even more tools to use to play with one’s identity. What’s broken in the melodrama, and in the self, was never easily fixed, but now it’s even harder; Dolan wants to pick up the pieces.
READ MORE: MUBI To Release Xavier Dolan’s ‘Matthias & Maxime’ In August On Its Streaming Platform
“I Killed My Mother” (2009)
“You”, or maybe it was “us”, or “me”, was Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2006, nearly a year-and-a-half after YouTube had launched, and only a few years later, the mix of performance and vulnerability could be felt in Xavier Dolan’s feature debut “I Killed My Mother,” his semi-autobiographical film about a young gay man and his complicated relationship with his mother. Framed by lead Hubert’s (Dolan) black and white confessionals, illustrated by brash and bold pretense, Dolan’s curiosity regarding aesthetic subjectivity in a personal and emotional landscape fraught with tension would become crucial to his aesthetic voice as a director. He looks dolefully into the camera, sometimes looking directly into the lens, sometimes looking past it, and says, with his voice a mixture of young braggadocio and naivete, “We should be able to kill ourselves. In our heads. And then be reborn. To be able to talk, look at each other, be together. As if we never met before.”
Here, Hubert is not merely queer kid riddled with angst and mommy issues, but a young man whose pain, tension, and desire is aestheticized in a desire to change his own world and the limitations of his own being.
Dolan’s triangulatory dynamics keep his aestheticized world and the harsher reality within which these fantasies inhabit in check, with Anne Dorval as his mother and Suzanne Clément as his teacher, both offering necessary counterpoints to Hubert’s flourish filled point of view, grounding him in the stakes of the situation. This dynamic, one of back and forth between youthful indulgence in feeling and emotion and a more mature approach that contextualizes those emotions within a broader environment, is perhaps what defines Dolan’s filmography. A grappling of one’s queerness that confronts the space outside, after self-conceiving it in the vacuum augmented by melodramas by Almodovar and Sirk. Dolan’s filmography, to some degree, is a coming of queerness within and then facing everyone else.
“Heartbeats” (2010)
That such an aesthetic and directorial dynamic feels much like an internal tennis match between a self as subject and then object makes Dolan a useful example of a Millennial filmmaker, in the sense that his perspective bounces between an insularity and a contextualizing of that insularity in a broader landscape. His sophomore feature, “Heartbeats,” thus recontextualizes the “dating as gambit, as labor” hook of “When Harry Met Sally” for a younger, hipper, queerer generation.
Necessarily, I think, “Heartbeats” becomes attuned to selfishness: between interviews with cute Quebecois singletons talking about the politics of being on the market, close friends Francis (Dolan) and Marie (Monia Chokri) vie for the affections of blonde-tresseled Nicolas (Niels Schneider), emotionally unavailable Eros incarnate. Francis and Marie’s friendship takes a backseat as they become enmeshed in their own desires and fantasies of a guy who’s happy to play along without the commitment, with each player self-interested in their own way.
That the triad at the center of the film thrives dramatically because of their own lack of self-awareness, this is true aesthetically as well: Dolan shoots in slow motion to Delida’s cover of “Bang Bang” as Francis and Marie amp up their personal arsenal of wit and beauty, has the boy in question dance to The Knife’s “Pass This On” under flickering lights and slows time down while Francis and Marie indulge in their dizzying crush. And why shouldn’t they?
While Dolan’s work occasionally acknowledges class politics, “Heartbeats” is both his freest and yet most sequestered work, liberated to cull from various visual and cinematic reference points, but happily clustered in a somewhat, to borrow a term from Whit Stillman, young urban haute bourgousie. Okay, the characters may not be that wealthy, but they comfortably move about as hipster yuppies looking for love in all the wrong places, and that has its own simple beauty.
“Laurence Anyways” (2012)
The gender politics of “Laurence Anyways” are comfortably planted in 2012, and with a 4:3 frame and candy-colored garments cascading from the sky, Dolan’s formalism is almost enough to forgive the lapses in judgment in his tale of a trans poet and teacher (cisgender actor Melvil Poupaud) whose coming out and transition upends her relationship with her girlfriend (Suzanne Clément).
“Laurence Anyways” is at its strongest when its focus is not so much on Laurence’s transness itself, or on the transition exactly, but the chasm that’s created between lovers and their ability to be known to one another. Laurence and “Fred” have an uncompromising magnetism, and Dolan’s eye is captivated by them as a couple, as if their bond prompts sparks to send the world around them up in flames. They are, at heart, star crossed lovers caught at the intersection of queer politics and poetry in one of Dolan’s most ravishing films. Scored to the likes of Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, and Tindersticks, as well as with the lurid sounds of Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, and Brahms, Dolan concocts an intoxicating cocktail of sound and fury.
For all of ‘Laurence’s’ flaws with regard to its exploration of trans identity, its portrait of emotional and artistic intimacy and collaboration, and the struggle to maintain it when people change, is still entrancing, explosive in its color and feeling, shaggy and drenched in emotion. Dolan’s inclination to hyper aestheticize Laurence’s interiority, her entire world for that matter, elides sophomorishness because of its sincerity, empathy, and maturity. If part of Dolan’s early oeuvre is defined by his characters’ myopia, ‘Laurence’ becomes a unique turning point in his work because of its desire to observe the evolution of a relationship and the way in which they help and hurt one another, beyond their own small spheres.
“Tom at the Farm” (2013)
One of the only films of Dolan’s to not premiere at Cannes, “Tom at the Farm” is arguably his most mature work, a director coming into his understanding of power and pleasure, and how to execute that formally. Based on a play and co-written by Michel Marc Bouchard, Dolan steers into explicit genre play, unearthing homoeroticism and gender play in the thriller as he cosplays as a Hitchcock blonde. Visiting the bucolic on which his late, closeted lover grew up and meeting his surviving mother (Lise Roy) and brother Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), Dolan uses “Tom at the Farm” to interrogate the eroticism of self-loathing and the pleasure in self-destruction.
Dolan’s hair is stringy, paradoxically weightless and heavy with treatment and neglect, his gay iteration of a Tippi Hedren or Kim Novak coming out on the other side with trauma in his scalp. He is fever, more emotional, and his stoicism is shabby at best. Francis is gruff, brusque; you can smell his machismo from here. They play queer erotic cat and mouse, each forcing the other to play replacement in the wake of grief and emotional displacement; the dance that Francis practiced, the secret that they share, are both about containing bodies and the people who lie about them.
“Tom at the Farm” allows Dolan to exercise some restraint, keeping most of his frames tight and his performances tauter, so that the wet nightmare of the film, the abusive and alluring dynamic that Tom and Francis find themselves in, oozes and seeps through the frame, allowing itself to build to a full-bodied climax. Painting in a muddy, wheat-colored palette, a departure from his usual high contrast pastels, Dolan imagines an allegory about the United States as the ultimate masc for masc sadist, someone whose musk we can’t get enough of even if it destroys us in the end.
“Mommy” (2014)
If “Mommy” can be said to function as a bit of a mirror image, and perhaps self-conscious reply to, his first feature, “I Killed My Mother,” that comes with the baggage of being able to express cinematically his own growth as an artist and director. Dolan embeds himself in the interiority of Anne Dorval’s Diane “Die” Després, who, as she tries to get back on her feet, struggles to take care of her son, Steve (Antoine Olivier Pilon), who has ADHD with manic and violent tendencies.
“Mommy’s” device of a 1:1 aspect ratio would be easy to write off were it not for his focus on frames as having a sociopolitical dimension: what’s in a picture frame if not a family, even the ones as fractured and fragmented as the ones that appear in Dolan’s films. In “Mommy,” Die, Steve, and neighbor-cum-additional surrogate mother Kyla (Clément) either spend their time trying to squeeze into the frame or fight for it, like children fighting for the attention of a cameraperson.
Dolan becomes keener at identifying the social and political systems at play in the marginalization of others, even within his fake dystopian world that impacts custody laws in Canada; here, Steve and Die are casualties in a system that cares not for the mentally ill nor those without access to means. But a question that haunts his filmography return: can love save us? It’s explicitly asked at the beginning of the film, and Dolan exquisitely has the looming specter of oppressive institutions leering over the melodrama at home, giving their personal strife a specificity and a wider implication. In a hallucination and a fantasy, the strike of chords in a Lana del Rey dream that love could be enough.
“It’s Only the End of the World” (2016)
As with his frame, Dolan’s thematic ambitions grew, deconstructing family ills in his second adaptation work, “It’s Only the End of the World” based on the play by Jean-Luc Lagarce, his first film with international stars. His little house of familial hurt is a sandbox ostensibly for Gaspard Ulliel, Nathalie Baye, Vincent Cassel, Marion Cotillard, and Léa Seydoux to play in. Ulliel’s Louis, a gay playwright nearing his mid-30s, returns home to tell his family he’s dying, his body a ticking time bomb somewhat literally and metaphorically.
The seams of Dolan’s skill are most present here, as he juggles five characters and their various interpersonal dynamics and conflicts. Shot mostly in claustrophobic closeups, there’s a frustrating lack of clarity and willingness to step back from the cacophony of family dysfunction to better understand a broader context of these relationships. Dolan is up in their faces all the time and forces his camera into spaces to make the spaces themselves shrink as the characters’ egos grow. But Dolan never clarifies the terrain, both spatially and emotionally, and with characters always at 3 or 11, the gradations and nuances of their characters are lost. Additionally, with Dolan’s desire to distance himself from the social context of the play, which was written in 1990 and whose author died of complications from AIDS, his attempt to provide a queer abstraction of a broken household feels unbearably staid.
“The Death and Life of John F. Donovan” (2018)
Xavier Dolan means well, even when he’s doing something that’s not very good. In a way, it problematizes his persona; sometimes brash and bratty, sometimes attentive and excitable, his public persona is, I think aspirationally, part of the text of his work, in a kind of Welles-ian way. “The Death and Life of John F. Donovan” was intended to be his starry, epic English-language opener, a timely consideration on the power of star persona and Hollywood, and the salve small relationships and secret-keepers can be to the famous. It was originally supposed to be over three hours long, an opus to follow “Laurence Anyways.”
But Dolan’s tale of the rise and fall of a well known, but closeted actor (Kit Harrington) and the tiny confidant he has in a little boy across the Atlantic (Jacob Tremblay), isn’t so much bad as it is undisciplined and unhoned, asking a question about A instead of asking a question about 1. It is packed, and then shorn, to a degree where its thematic, ideological, and philosophical queries are rendered barely legible.
Dolan returns to an interview framing device not necessarily because it assists with the unpacking of celebrity, the desire to know someone whose performance of self you know, or the ways in which identity is molded and constrained within such systems, but because it feels like an easy way out to have the questions do the work without having to confront the actual answers. Dolan continues to be a competent stylist, his rococo movement somewhat a salve in the film.
“Matthias and Maxime” (2019)
Xavier Dolan’s return to the front of the camera has, somewhat charmingly, required him to rescale his dramatic ambitions: as opposed to the imposing trans-Atlantic, time-hopping ensemble narrative of “The Death and Life of John F. Donovan,” “Matthias and Maxime” is smaller, more restrained, more contained, a little more precise with its emotional trajectory. Perhaps not accidentally recalling “Heartbeats,” a kiss shared between two close friends (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas and Dolan, respectively) for a student short film sets off a small, but meaningful chain reaction, forcing the two to either recalculate their relationship or leave it like a newly opened wound untended.
This is Dolan’s post-grad film, dropping his characters on the precipice of having the confront adulthood, leaving their youth behind, and faced with the gendered, aggressively and toxically masculine behavior that has been hitherto unquestioned and unchecked. Having to both perform and do something that challenges conventional masculine ideals, on camera no less, is an uncomfortable wakeup call for Matthias in particular, whose feeling of protection inside his white-collar job and marble-like facial features is weathered away by the shock of what a kiss can do to someone.
Anne Dorval returns as Maxime’s recovering addict mother, and, together with the overall contrast in class backgrounds between the lead characters, certain scenes play out as if Hubert and his mother from “I Killed My Mother” never really found a way to communicate with each other or find a way to love one another.
There are fine gestures towards a continually evolving filmmaker, even if “Matthias and Maxime” purposefully feels sparer even in Dolan’s melodramatic lexicon, but even then, characters are occasionally hazily written and certain actions or decisions feel surprisingly rote. But Dolan exercises great care in allowing his build of frustration, confusion, and erotic tension in the back half of the film, honing on his skill of letting emotional water balloons burst and laying his characters’ fears and desires bare.
Other Works
Beyond his film work since 2009, and his appearances as an actor from the age of eight, Dolan has also directed music videos, such as Adele’s “Hello”, off her album 25, and “College Boy” by Indochine, both videos functioning like tests for formal techniques he would use in subsequent films. “College Boy,” released in 2013 and which features “Mommy” star Antoine Olivier Pilon, operates for Dolan as an intriguing appetizer for “Mommy” inasmuch as it’s the first time the director experiments with the tight 1:1 aspect ratio and high contrast black and white. Here, too, Dolan fixates on the ills of masculinity both at home and, in this case, at school, as Pilon plays a student viciously bullied by classmates and derided by his family. He is brutalized and crucified by the bullies, made a martyr, and the people around him, wearing blindfolds, see nothing: not the teachers, not the nuns, not the police. While it gives Dolan a chance to work with the narrow framing, his provocation is curiously abrasive for a short 6-minute clip, but nonetheless targets institutions who ignore, or actively oppress, marginalized by society.
His video for Adele, released in 2015, comparatively, is tenderer, even nostalgic, with its greenish sepia tone and dust-filled interior. But Adele is the star here, her gorgeous face emotive and expressive of every lyric, while the past plays out in the old house she peruses. Shot mostly in extreme closeups between her, an ex (Tristan Wilds), Dolan and cinematographer Andre Turpin revel in the contours and facets of Adele’s face. With such focus on Adele’s visage, and shallow depth of focus on the trinkets and tchotchkes littering the house, “Hello” provided Dolan a template for his Tracy Letts-esque family melodrama “It’s Only the End of the World,” which was also heavy on closeups and house clutter, like an obsession with artifacts as memories.
Xavier Dolan’s work has proven to be somewhat polarizing, but the division that is incited by his work is occasionally beside the point. Though his style is markedly different, and much more enamored of high camp, extreme emotions, and sanguine palettes, his function in the film world is not so dissimilar to that of Lena Dunham’s in television. She, too, satirically declared her character the voice of a generation, lost, adrift, and unsure, and Dolan’s art-house approach does not change its goals. To seek understanding, to contextualize oneself in broader society and its systems, and repair oneself. Through the aspect ratio changes, the ‘90s music, the splashes of color, the slow motion, the sweeping crane shots, and the screaming, everything has felt like an attempt to recognize how broken young people can be and how fractured their relationships can become with others, borne of complicated dynamics with the past. Dolan has only ever wanted to pick up those pieces of the melodrama and try to put them back together, even if he gets a few cuts along the way.