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Rating: From my blog
A clear step back compared to Mommy, Xavier Dolan's new film is extremely ambitious in its intentions. It explores the impossibility of communicating with one's family and telling them that one's life is ending, because what dominates is a chatter that alternates superficiality, neurosis, insults, gossip, feuds, moments of genuine fun, and some precious memories of past times. The chatter never stops, it continues its cycle, and meanwhile, the truly important topics slip away, constantly postponed.
The problem in depicting a subject like this lies in finding the right balance between mimetic necessity and the need to vary, to create a gap with reality and its aberrations. Cinema is never a perfect copy of reality. In this sense, Dolan perhaps gets a bit carried away by the desire for mimesis: nothing wrong with that, but to support such an ambition script-wise would have required much more inspired writing, less blatantly in a supercazzola style. This is the huge limitation of the film: after a while, not very long in truth, the author's intentions become too clear and then it's understood that the supercazzola will continue until the end.
For the rest, there is much good, but almost nothing that wasn't already appreciated in Xavier's other works. Perhaps the only significant change concerns the music, which on one hand dares to venture into the realm of commercial pop (the choice of Dragostea Din Tei is astounding), demonstrating the director's ability to give semantic meaning to otherwise insignificant songs; on the other, there is an extensive use of musical commentary made with strings or similar. Such repeated emphatic emphasis does not benefit the film and tinges it with a somewhat unexpected pathos for the young brazen Dolan.
Even the character development, effective as it may be, is less convincing compared to Mommy, but also compared to earlier works. The actors are excellent, but there is a lack of the full-bodied complexity that had made other figures unforgettable. Here, each has a well-defined role and, although contradictory elements are not lacking, the various profiles tend to limit themselves to their diegetic function. There are no big surprises or truly shattering contradictions, also because the crazy nature of the dialogues is soon understood, and therefore their strength is diminished. It all becomes a farce, or at least that's how it seemed to me.
The greatest asset, however, is the direction and the management of the theatrical dimension of the work. Dolan shatters space and time, once again, and transforms the events of half a day into existential mechanics, into symbols that summarize the meanings of entire lives. The cinema of young Dolan always has a great impact: the shots linger on faces and explore them, the environments speak, every moment of the theater piece of life carries absolute, ontological meanings. But from a film so triumphantly announced, I expected much more. It seems to me instead devoid of a new and heartfelt poetic moment.
6.5
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