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Dreaming Bigger, Screaming Louder Quebecois firecracker Xavier Dolan says he sees cinema as revenge against the mundanities of everyday life. With his brilliant new melodrama Mommy, that revenge is served piping hot
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n May 2009, a young man named Xavier Dolan arrived in Cannes to present his new film, the story of a troubled relationship between a mother and her son. In May 2014, a young man named Xavier Dolan arrived in Cannes to present his new film, the story of a troubled relationship between a mother and her son. Just five years passed between
the release of Dolan’s debut feature I Killed My Mother and his latest film Mommy, but the difference we can see in the artist who made them is extraordinary. What looked like raw potential in 2009 has since been brilliantly realised. Although the subject matter and the presence of Anne Dorval and Suzanne Clément in the cast list may encourage us to draw comparisons between these two films, Dolan refutes any suggestion that Mommy is a revisitation of earlier themes. “A movie about mothers and sons is like a movie on human beings,” he tells me. “It really is just so vast a theme, and encompasses so many, many, many possibilities for characters who are defined by quests and dreams
INTERVIEW:
Philip Concannon
and personalities rather than just titles.” In general, Dolan is a man who is too busy looking forward to contemplate what’s behind him, but he is conscious of the progress he has made so far, admitting that he finds it hard to watch some of the more jejune moments in his first two features. ”Certainly, every new film is a new opportunity, not necessarily to explore things you haven’t explored in previous endeavours, but more likely to avoid repeating mistakes you’ve made in those,” he explains. As well as eliminating those mistakes, Dolan has ventured boldly into exciting new territory. After shoo- ting his 2012 film Laurence Anyways in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, Mommy finds the director squeezing the frame continues…