DOLAN’S LATEST WORTHY OF ITS CANNES ACCLAIM
Narrative, filmcraft work in tandem in Quebecer’s most disciplined film
Words fly in Xavier Dolan’s sixth film, It’s Only the End of the World (Juste la fin du monde). They rain down from the sky, landing in flurries, allowing only occasional moments to catch one’s breath before beginning anew. It’s overwhelming, and that’s the point.
Based on the play of the same name by the late French playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce, who died in 1995 from AIDS-related illness, the film caused a frenzy at Cannes, drawing the ire of U.S. critics before going on to claim the runner-up Grand Prix. It is the highest award Dolan has won at the same festival that originally made him a star, and rightfully so.
While imbued with his trademark flamboyance, this is the Quebec director’s most disciplined work, in which narrative and filmcraft function in dazzling tandem. Having recruited some of France’s top acting talent, Dolan nevertheless puts his own distinct stamp on the final product.
Louis (Gaspard Ulliel), is a successful playwright returning home to visit his estranged family, whom he hasn’t seen in 12 years. He comes bearing bad news: he is terminally ill. But sharing that information is easier said than done — his family being family, well, they kind of take over.
There is Louis’s mother (Nathalie Baye), giddy and doting, with flashes of overbearingness. Done up in gaudy makeup, she is the visual incarnation of the general exaggeration on display throughout the film.
Louis’s little sister Suzanne (Léa Seydoux) envelops him in a desperate embrace upon arrival, and takes her time letting go. Beneath her affection is a torment that reveals itself incrementally over the course of the film.
Older brother Antoine (Vincent Cassel) is a tougher nut to crack. He keeps a cool distance at first, his intermittent angry outbursts giving way to full-on (and often comical) tirades of vitriol.
Antoine’s mild-mannered wife, Catherine (Marion Cotillard), makes an art form of insecurity, stuttering nervously as she looks to her husband for approval while oversharing the details of their life. Yet it is with her that Louis experiences some of the film’s most tender moments.
Everyone else is too caught up in their own angst to really pay much attention to him. Louis is talked at and yelled at and fawned over, but rarely listened to. When he is asked a question, he struggles to get the words out.
All of this would add up to so much melodrama if it weren’t for Dolan’s daring cinematic approach. By framing everything in relentlessly tight close-up, courtesy of go-to cinematographer André Turpin, he creates a kind of meta-narrative that encourages us not just to listen to, but to look more attentively at these overwrought characters in crisis.
And as we do, the individual words matter less; their frenetic cadence, the lush colours, stark lighting, omnipresent music and emotional expressionism come to the fore.
The resulting sensorial barrage is shrewdly effective, and oddly affecting.