Xavier Dolan makes films about mothers and sons where nobody lowers their voice, shot so close the frame can barely hold the faces. At his best, in Mommy, few directors get more out of an actor; when the feeling runs out, the volume is all there is.
Fi1m perspective
A woman's face fills a square frame in Mommy (2014). Dolan shot the film at 1:1, so there is room for one person at a time and no room to look away, and the person is usually shouting. Anne Dorval plays Diane 'Die' Després, raising a teenage son who can be affectionate one minute and violent the next, and Dolan keeps the camera on her until the temper starts to read as love. That is his cinema in a sentence: mothers and sons, faces, and a volume knob that only turns one way.
He has been in front of a camera since he was four, in commercials and dubbing, and he wrote and directed I Killed My Mother (2009) at twenty, playing the son himself. Heartbeats (2010), Laurence Anyways (2012) and Tom at the Farm (2013) followed in four years, a rate most directors manage in twelve. Mommy is where the wider attention arrived, and it is the one we would send you to first. Since then he has made It's Only the End of the World (2016), from a play and with an international cast; The Death & Life of John F. Donovan (2019), his first film in English; Matthias & Maxime the same year; and the series The Night Logan Woke Up (2022).
What works is the acting. Dorval has made five films with him and Suzanne Clément three, and the return trips show: in Mommy the three leads carry the film past its own excesses, and Dorval is superb as a mother the film could easily have asked us to dislike. André Turpin, his cinematographer on three films, lights faces so that every line and pore is evidence. Mommy moved us more than we expected, mostly through Die's refusal to be the woman other people have decided she is, and then it wore us out. Dolan also edits, and he will not leave an argument once it has landed. The swings from confrontation to exhilaration are thrilling the first few times; across 138 minutes they start to make different scenes feel like the same scene.
The complaint that follows him is that the style has become the point. Tom at the Farm drew the word indulgent, and the later films have divided critics, some of whom found It's Only the End of the World cold. We have not reviewed those and will not pretend to a verdict on them here. He has said of the labels attached to him: "Of all the labels and tags and epithets people have forced upon me, there's one I don't dislike. I get called the 'enfant terrible'."
He has earned the second word. Start with Mommy, watch it in one sitting if you can stand to, and decide for yourself whether the shouting is the point or the price.
Biography
Xavier Dolan is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, editor, actor and costume designer. Born in Montreal in 1989, he began his career as a child actor in commercials and television before making his feature directorial debut with I Killed My Mother (2009), which he also wrote, produced and starred in. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight section.
Dolan has written and directed eight feature films since 2009, most of which premiered at Cannes. His credits on Mommy (2014) include director, writer, producer, editor and costume designer; the film won the Jury Prize at Cannes. Other notable works include Heartbeats (2010), Laurence Anyways (2012), Tom at the Farm (2013), It's Only the End of the World (2016, Grand Prix at Cannes) and Matthias & Maxime (2019). He has also directed music videos, including for Adele, and acted in films by other directors such as Boy Erased (2018) and It Chapter Two (2019). Dolan has received numerous awards, including several Canadian Screen Awards and César Awards.
