The 25-year-old film-maker Xavier Dolan [brought] white trash and black comedy to the Cannes competition – with a grey area of tragedy and heartbreak in between. The theme of mothers and sons returns this director to the motif of his first film J'Ai Tué Mon Mère (2009). But now it's the mother who feels like doing the killing.
It's an uproariously emotional movie, to all appearances painfully personal and featuring performances which are almost operatic in scale. These are real heart-on-sleeve performances; even heart-on-straightjacket performances. The film has its flaws, relating to an indulgent length and a reliance on an imagined near-future in which there is a specific new Canadian law which makes the plot work. But Dolan's energy and attack is thrilling; his movie is often brilliant and very funny in ways which smash through the barriers marked Incorrect and Inappropriate.
From the first, an oddity strikes you – the screen's aspect ratio is reduced to the "portrait" shape of a selfie taken on an upright mobile phone. Later Dolan will show, poignantly, that this screen-shape relates to the characters' restricted horizons.
Anne Dorvak plays Diane, a widow making ends meet with cleaning jobs: she is feisty, lippy, sexy and dresses like a teenager. The cross she has to bear is her teenage son Steve, who has ADHD and is aggressively unstable with boundary issues, and an inability to stop swearing, fighting and touching women. Yet when calm, he is intelligent and sweet-natured.
Steve has just been discharged from a care facility and now Diane must care for him at home – and this is a chaotic and horribly hilarious nightmare. Antoine Olivier Pilon's performance as Steve is tremendous: he is entirely, hilariously out of control.
But then a miracle happens for both mother and son. They befriend a lonely woman next door called Kyla (Suzanne Clément), a shy schoolteacher recovering from a breakdown which left her with a stammer. Yet she has an instant rapport with Steve, and helps him with his schoolwork – and their friendship even seems to calm her speech problems.
The trailer-trash humour is superbly transgressive, but then evolves into something else: an involving, heartfelt story. You might expect the narrative to develop in sexual ways, and so it does, but not in a predictable style. All three actors give it everything they've got, which is a great deal. These performances are arguably too broad occasionally with a touch of daytime soap. But it is a pleasure to see acting – and directing – which is blasting away on all the emotional cylinders. Full strength, but under control. It is another notable triumph for Dolan. Prodigies don't get much more prodigious than this.
http://en.gigamir.net/agenda/kino/pub479953
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