Xavier Dolan
Mommy

There's this woman, the name is none of your concern. She's still quite attractive, as shown by the very close first shot. Quite a rear end, especially considering she's closer to fifty than forty. A rather spicy character and a colorful way of speaking that is not exactly Eton-like. And indeed, we're in Canada, not England. Where exactly? It's none of your concern. The protagonist of this paragraph doesn't have much money, but in exchange, loads of problems.
There's this teenage boy, but how clever: you get it without me having to write it. He's a real mess, like a volcano with a stomach ache. Ready to explode violently and without warning over nothing: the name of the disease, as you keenly understood, is none of your concern. We're in the second scene, and he's just set a fire in the hospital where he was admitted, and now his roommate isn't doing too well either.

The director, whose name shouldn't matter, used particular filming techniques, similar to how I tried to write in the two previous paragraphs. The images are shot in an unusual, cramped, and narrow format of 4:3, which makes it difficult for two people to share the same frame. An original way to highlight through shots, the titanic difficulty of this mother attempting to educate and tame an impossible son. A wild horse.

She and he are grumpy, irascible yet simultaneously fragile individuals, needing mutual help and fundamentally romantic: they love and hate each other madly, living intensely and exaggeratedly, making the everyday a wild race on a narrow road without guardrails. In most films dealing with a parent/child relationship, one of the two characters bends to the other's will, gradually and increasingly eliciting the audience's sympathy. This mother is not part of that category and, while wanting to help her son, has such a strong personality that a spectacular clash filled with melancholy, frustration, pride, and anger is inevitable.

Maybe it's for this reason that the director introduces into the film's plot the other, the neighbor: stuttering, seemingly submissive, and devoted to home and church, she eventually acts as a glue. The cartilage between tibia and femur meant to ease the clash between the bones whenever a twist of the script propels the work. The film, especially in its initial stage, enjoys a good pace and alternates moments of hilarity and lightness with others of total clash, violence, and drama. Progressively, almost imperceptibly, the laughter becomes increasingly rare to harden the film into a thick layer of reinforced concrete.

To try to shake the viewer, even to shock them in the finale, the author forces the screenplay projecting the story into the near future, 2015, thus creating a solid grip to deliver the final blow. Definitive. It's a very strong film, well acted, capable of moving without pitying and descending into the mushy and rhetorical. Mommy makes you think and leaves a mark: for all these reasons, and others I might not have captured, I recommend you go see it.