Critics are wondering how to be more effective not to like this movie. I have read in many places that he is kitsch, that he is full of creaking melodrama, that he is tedious that he is based on a faint play. Some call it the first failure of Canadian director Xavier Dolan, 29 years old, and this is his sixth film. Xavier Dolan appeared on the horizon when he was barely twenty. "I killed my Mother" robbed the ovations in Cannes and was immediately released at 12 cinemas in Quebec and 60 across France. Everyone is fascinated by the courage and shine of Xavier Dolan. He demonstrates inspiring maturity for his age, combined with a sense of cinema language. He have a hipster vision (clothes, music, slow footage, daring dialogues), but he's not annoyingly naive. In my opinion, the real jewel of all 6 films that Xavier has done so far is "Mommy". As with some of the front, the fuel of the plot is the relationship between a boy and his mother. Xavier says his favorite theme is the theme of the different. He shared that he was annoying people's approach to the word "strange." They usually use it from haughty frustration - from the lack of a better speech, to a clearer explanation. When someone says something is "stramge," he seldom puts a thought beyond the linguistic habit. It is not intended to explain this strangely moving and functioning among the normal. And some people - even from courtesy or political over-righteousness - do not admit that this strange thing is actually hateful to them. And what a less lack of courage! In all of his films, Dolan portrays this oddly to his particular strange root. Shows a guy who is gay and has trouble with aggression. Which has no friends. Shows his mother, who can not deal with him. He shows scenes of how they both swear and beat, dancing to Celine Dion in the kitchen, their bodies clinging to each other. Real life, but not a gentle, but colorful spirit, like a candy filter. "Mommy" is a wonderful painting, painted with the palette of emotions through which a boy and a mother go by, confused, detached from the world, and extremely dependent on love for each other.
His latest film, "It's Only the End of the World" is quite different. The frames are bluish-melancholy. The music is the same. The main character is much more silent than any other Dolan's main character. (Unlike the others in the movie, who spit without a break and vomit words.) Louis (Caspar Juliet) is a well-known writer, playwright. He has not seen his family for 12 years. He travels to the plane and thinks of how each person's life is coming - to admit to his dear ones that he is sick and will die. The whole movie follows the few hours of their meeting - he arrives, they meet him - his mother (Natalie Bai), his sister (Lea Seidou), his brother (Ventan Kassel) and his brother's wife (Marion Cotilia). They sit down at the table and start talking. With each other, a whirlwind of theatrical hurricane, which shows us the comic and nightmare dysfunctions of their family. Louis is the family's golden child. "Everybody admire you, everyone wants to talk to you," is a mother's replica of a wonderful scene, where the two, caught in something like a closet, are staring in the dark, illuminated by the outgoing light of the sunset day. And indeed Louis is the most successful of them. While he has achieved fame and good money away in America, his older brother still lives in a provincial town in France and deals with God knows what (Louis does not seem to know with what). His younger sister has closed a square - once in herself, once in her room that has been smoked with weed. Do not go out there because there is nowhere to go? "Because there is nothing to inspire her," says Louis's mother. And he asks his son - as if she asks his husband for help with education - to raise the spirit of the children, to say something positive to them. All the time, Louis just smiles. He spoke a little, encouragingly, or apologetically, like a man who stepped on the rug with muddy shoes. It seems to him that he is restless, but to the viewers. It seems as if his whole family, too busy consuming the old subjects, does not notice that a man has been thrown in front of them, the tongue of whose language is tantalizing. It is enough for them that he is there and that after 12 years of silence he has to hear all they have to say.
To me, the movie seemed like torture at times. It could also be turned into a surrealistic camera thriller in which a vengeful family tied a returning prodigal son to a chair and stumbled in all sorts of ways with him until everything escalated into a horror absurd and the whole house did not catch fire in the middle of the field. Repeatable and overexposed dialogues are such that it is normal for the viewer to get tired and want to clog his ears. When asked in an interview with Xavier Dolan about the script, he replies that the film is based on a play. The play is by Jean-Luc Lagars, who has very deliberately written their speech incongruous, unnatural. These people don't speak normally because they don't feel normal. They say anything but what they want to say (especially Catherine, the character of Marion Cotillard). They don't have a filter, they have no brake, they talk about the last one. And ultimately, if it's really the end of the world, how should they talk? Yes, the movie may be suffocating. On the one hand, the cadres are all close, inches from the faces of the actors. On the other hand, it is a house where there is not much to hide, because someone will run after you to tell you that in 20 minutes the dessert will be served so you can hurry. And the dialogue I have already mentioned and which is constantly tired purely physically not only the characters but also the viewer. On several occasions, too, I wished for silence, I sincerely prayed for one of Xavier's songs, to do this, to rest a little. And indeed, the music and the silence (as well as its recognizable slow footage) are included when Louis remembers or dreams. His memories are the only escapism, the only way to fly to childhood, to the youthful years that sparkled in his calm and in love. "Take me to the old house," Louis asks with a smile. And he's giggle asking him why, did he forget anything?
Xavier Dolan rebuts biographical questions about his films with the answer that he himself has a wonderful family. It does not draw dysfunctionality from it, but from the emotions that create and accompany it and which every sentient person knows. Alienation , misunderstanding, fear, guilt, aggression. When you understand these conditions, you can build any storyline because they are human, stable opponents. Also to the cinema issue (yes, critics and journalists love to ask for inspiration, as if the short route to the treasure is indicated), Xavier Dolan replies that he has not seen many films. Actually, he started watching movies actively at 15, which is good. 10 years of watching movies. Of course, he was watching the classics, he was fascinated by "Magnolia" and Paul Thomas Anderson, but he definitely did not build his vision as a director. He is rather drawn from his personal boldness to showcase her inner world and give him legitimacy.