David O'ConnellI Killed My Mother/Heartbeats
April 6th 2011 01:24
Xavier Dolan is a precocious talent. This young French-Canadian actor and filmmaker is currently working on his third feature at the ripe old age of 22. His career as a writer and director began in startling fashion in 2009 with the release of I Killed My Mother (2009), a delicious black comedy of cruelty about the tempestuous relationship between a mother and her son.
Dolan himself stars as seventeen year old Hubert, a tortured teen whose mother, Chantale (Anne Dorval), antagonises him with every gesture, every word. It’s a classic love-hate relationship between a misunderstood youth itching to escape his mother’s clutches and mature ahead of his time and a woman whose worst crime might be her deplorable taste in decor and general indifference to her son’s plight.
Chantale is not over-protective in the least but Dolan draws blackly comic insights from Hubert’s exasperation at either her obliqueness, her apathy to his vitriol, or the unsatisfactory way she eats a piece of fruit. The minutiae of their overlapping lives draws the heat of irritation from Hubert; we shouldn’t be laughing at his tirades but the humour inherent in these avenging, cathartic outbursts reveals uncomfortable truths about a childish temptation of our own to vent our spleen, social decorum be damned.
Hubert speaks frankly in asides to an off-camera listener: “We should be able to kill ourselves………………in our heads. And be reborn. To be able to talk, look at each other, be together – as if we’d never met before. If my mother and I were strangers, I’m sure we’d get along”.
But they don’t and Hubert becomes exasperated by their proximity to one another which magnifies every point of contention and acts like nails drawn down a blackboard. He suggests moving into a flat with a friend but is denied. Then Chantel proposes an extreme step of her own, deciding to send Hubert to a boarding school which complicates his feelings towards his mother even further.
Dolan and Dorval as antagonists in the brilliant I Killed My Mother
Visually, Dolan proves himself a hypnotic stylist, a virtuoso of emotional manipulation; a series of mini-montages, mostly staged in slow-motion and set to evocative music (in explicit homage to Wong Kar-wai’s work with composer Shigeru Umabayashi) offer a dreamy infusion of narrative recesses. These idiosyncratic collages are what distinguish Dolan’s vision; his work consistently offers evidence of instinct overruling expectation, of artistic maturity that refuses to be hemmed in.
The most remarkable aspect of I Killed My Mother is how adeptly Dolan maintains his assured tonal balance, never allowing the extremes of angst to spill over into absurdity or cliché. With these pitfalls nimbly avoided he’s able to sustain his pitch like a veteran director.
The title of the film is infused with the reverberation of its ambiguity: is it descriptive of a literal act, or only an appealingly hypothetical one? You’ll have to see this dazzling debut for yourself to find out.
Heartbeats
Dolan’s second feature, Heartbeats (2010), is a less successful venture, positing a misaligned love triangle in which two friends often cruelly vie for the attention of a newcomer to their social set. Dolan again stars in one of the leads as Francis who is best friends with Marie (Monia Chokri). Their friendship is jeopardised however when both almost instantly become infatuated with a fresh face at a friend's party, Nicolas (Niels Schneider).
The finest performance belongs to Chokri for her work as the edgy, monstrously jealous Marie who is not above self-humiliation to win the attention of the indifferent Nicolas. Her ploy backfires horribly the deeper she sinks into desperation borne of an irrational need to be acknowledged by the object of her affection. Dolan himself gives another assured performance both in front of and behind the camera.
The fundamental weakness of Heartbeats is in the rendering of Nicolas who exhibits little depth, questioning his credibility in being able to so easily win the affections of two newcomers simultaneously and with such intensity. In truth Nicolas is a bit of a drip, a vacuous, vaguely handsome young man but with all the intellectual depth of a bar of soap. Yet Dolan's prime directive is more in revealing the hurtful ramifications of the disintegration of Francis and Marie's bond; in this case, the objectification of Nicolas serves its purpose regardless of the negligibility our own perceptions taint him with.
Despite this central conceit of Nicolas's hypnotic allure, the film possesses a sufficient level of visual attraction to recommend it. In what amounts to confirmation of his signature Dolan again employs a series of slow-motion montages at regular intervals; incurable reflex it seem the second time around, but these episodes serve a higher function, heightening the emotional distance between the characters whilst refracting the tenderly observed frailties of Francis and Marie's poisoned mental states.
In Heartbeats Dolan may be seen as suffering from a mild sophomore slump after the lofty standard set by I Killed My Mother. Essentially here he’s riffing of the vagaries of misplaced lust, but there is enough evidence to confirm his reputation as a prodigiously talented young auteur who, frighteningly, must surely still be years away from reaching maturity.
Xavier Dolan: Heartbeats and I Killed My Mother screens at ACMI in Melbourne from 7 April until 1 May 2011. For program information and session times please visit www.acmi.net.au
The cavorting trio of Dolan, Schneider and Chokri in Heartbeats
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Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
So the original title is The Imaginary Lovers ...?
Comment by David O'Connell
Screen Fanatic