Xavier Dolan
Tom à la ferme

Gradually, even we poor Italians are managing to see Dolan's first films in cinemas. After Laurence Anyways, this Tom à la ferme, the fourth work of the Canadian enfant prodige, fresh winner at Cannes, is also being released (in very few theaters). Having not yet seen the other three films by Xavier, the only comparison I can offer is with Mommy. It is evident that between the two works, there is a remarkable stylistic and overall maturity gap. Narratively, Tom is a very good film, certainly, but it also presents several excessively loud and somewhat awkward moments, far from the mature and almost pacified vision of Mommy.

The style is not yet fully defined and personal; too emphatic or academic, without fresh insights. The music is revealing in this sense: here we have a couple of tearjerking songs and an orchestral score that would have been more suited to a police thriller. The tension is starkly highlighted with somewhat clumsy and out-of-place sound peaks. The story is therefore translated into a genre that does not fully belong to it, resulting in being overemphasized, blaring in an indelicate way. Or rather, the delicacy is there, but it is often juxtaposed with thrilling moments that work less effectively than hoped. Not a big deal, we are still talking about a director who in 2013 was just 24 years old; if anything, on reflection, it's the extreme maturity of Mommy that is bewildering.

Tom à la ferme also falters a bit in the writing of the dialogues, often cumbersome and unnatural: telling is the sequence at the bar where Tom is told a violent episode from many years ago featuring Francis. If there was a way to dampen the impact of words, the screenwriters found it. This lack of sharpness in words further clashes with the shouted style of the direction.

But all things considered, these are not compromising flaws, especially given the remarkable overall narrative richness. From this perspective, Dolan is already operating on high levels: the character construction is admirable, managing to postulate a series of agonizing contradictions that have Francis, brother of the deceased Guillaume, as their epicenter. But perhaps here the character portraits are more conceptual and symbolic than intimate (after all, this is a film of denunciation [1]), also due to a style that can't delve as deeply as it will in Mommy. The characters are well-made, complex, contradictory, swept and overturned by passions and feelings in constant conflict and upheaval; but something is missing. What is missing are the peculiar features, even gratuitous ones, that would make the profiles emerge from the screen, making them feel real. Missing are the unnecessary details, the sequences of pure digression that complete the well-roundedness of the characters. Dolan could have told us much more about people, beyond writing excellent and non-trivial narrative functions. The framing is emblematic: the director seems almost afraid to get too close to Francis, out of modesty or fear of such a fragmented ego. But in short, comparison with his subsequent work risks leading us to unduly diminish this good film.

The figure of Francis is nonetheless memorable in his ability to hold together Eros and Thánatos. Dolan piles on this figure many elements and lets them react like in an insane chemical formula. An exceptional psychological coagulation (well rendered by actor Pierre-Yves Cardinal) that unfortunately is not explored to the fullest, also because the issues at stake are enormous and evidently the director is not yet ready to perform everything in the best way. The film opens many windows and then does not know/does not want to close them. Perhaps because more than finding solutions, the director is interested in opening critical fronts, setting the premises for representing destructive conflicts, like that of poor Francis, victim and executioner at the same time. Or maybe simply he is still too young and inexperienced in life to provide answers to certain heavy questions.

6.5/10

[1] In reality, Mommy is too, but in my opinion much less so. In my review, I said that the use of the 1:1 format could serve to keep the characters in a directorial embrace, not to leave them alone. Dolan contradicted me a few months ago, when he sent a letter to Netflix complaining that the film's format had been changed, thus disintegrating "the sense of social oppression represented by that format". Boh, I continue to see in Mommy a "hope against all odds".