Wunderkind French-Canadian director Xavier Dolan is one of
those people whose career can’t help but make you feel inadequate about how
much you’ve managed to accomplish with your life. Only 25 years old and Dolan
has already directed five feature films, every one of which has premiered at
the Cannes Film Festival. It’s enough to make you irritated, if the kid weren’t
so damn talented. His first film, the semi-autobiographical “I Killed My
Mother,” received only a small release in the states, though it did screen in
Rochester at the ImageOut Film Festival in 2010 (and
is one of my favorite films the festival has ever shown). Dolan’s latest
feature, “Mommy” acts as a sort of companion piece to that film. Whereas the
previous film focused on a fraught mother-son relationship with a bias toward
the contemptuous offspring, here the director’s sympathies are much more
aligned with the object of that maternal disdain as it depicts the intense
(borderline incestuous) relationship between widowed mother Diane (Anne Dorval)
and her mercurial teenage son, Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon).
Its opening
crawl marks the film as technically science-fiction, explaining that the story
is set in an alternate Canada in which parents can commit their troubled
teenagers to a state institution if raising them proves too difficult. As the
film opens, Steve’s violently aggressive behavior has gotten him kicked out of
the juvenile detention center where he’s been living, and released back into
his mother’s custody. Already struggling to make ends meet, it’s an added
burden Diane can barely afford to take on.
Dissatisfied
with her own home life, a timid neighbor, Kyla (Suzanne Clรฉment), allows
herself to be drawn into the pair’s orbit, becoming a confidant to Diane and a
tutor for Steve. The three form a tight unit, though it might not be enough to
save them when the boy’s compulsively destructive impulses threaten to ruin everything
they’ve built. As one social service worker warns Diane early on, “Loving
people doesn’t save them.”
Formally
inventive, “Mommy” is shot in a 1:1 aspect ratio, making the film look like an
Instagram photo come to life. Meant to make the audience feel as boxed in as
the film’s characters, that decision might have felt
gimmicky in less capable hands, but Dolan turns it into an effective tool. When
combined with the restrictive framing and heightened emotions, the film’s
hyperactive pace can be overwhelming, but also exhilarating. I wish Dolan would
find himself a more ruthless editor — the director has a history of indulgence
when it comes to the length of his films — but the breadth does allow ample
time for his actors to shine. By its nature, Pilon’s
performance feels like a lot of adolescent posturing, but he always makes it
compelling. Dorval and Clรฉment, on the other hand, are nothing short of
luminous.
This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2015.
