A kiss is just a kiss ... or is it?
Canadian director Dolan’s film explores the fraught landscape of youthful love
Though just 30, Quebec’s Xavier Dolan now has a long enough career as a director — 10 years and eight films, including several prizewinners at the Cannes festival — that one can begin to speak of periods in his work, and of greater or lesser Dolan films.
Matthias et Maxime is definitely on the lesser end of the spectrum, and it also represents a thematic throwback of sorts. Dolan’s early work was almost painfully personal, with the writer-director also starring in stories of youthful love, confusion and indiscretion; see his 2009 debut I Killed My Mother, or its followup, Heartbeats.
Lately, he’s moved on to more mature protagonists while stepping out of the frame and also sharing writing duties; 2016’s It’s Only the End of the World was based on a play, while The Death and Life of John F. Donovan lists Jacob Tierney as co-writer.
Here he’s back in the thick of things as sole writer, director
and co-star. He plays Maxime, a 30-year-old Montrealer who’s planning a two-year trip to Australia to find himself and perhaps improve his English, which is choppy.
Dolan himself is fluently bilingual, and doesn’t have a prominent birthmark covering half his face, so don’t read too much autobiography into this. But many of the director’s trademark flourishes are here — a wild musical palette (everything from Mozart to Limp Bizkit), powerful/overpowering mothers and a story that hinges on sexuality.
That story is remarkably slight, however, with little to no stakes for the viewer.
Maxime, who is gay and a bit at sea career-wise, has a longtime platonic friend in Matthias (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas), an up-and-coming lawyer with a girlfriend, played by Marilyn Castonguay.
The two are part of a larger circle of boisterous male friends, but the dynamic gets wrenched out of whack when the pals impetuously agree to kiss each other in a scene for a student film being shot by the younger sister of one of their group. Their subsequent confusion drives the rest of narrative.
The way Dolan sketches out the huge generation and language gaps between 20- and 30-year-olds in Montreal is one of the film’s true delights, as is his comic use of rapid-fire franglais, or “frenglish” as it is known in English. It may trouble the language cops, but je care pas.
A kiss is just a kiss, as the old song goes, but Dolan makes the unusual decision to cut to black before we see lips lock. And when the film-within-the-film gets a screening later in the proceedings, darned if we don’t miss it again. It’s a cheeky holding back, but I’d rather have seen it, if only to gauge the emotional intensity during and directly after, which speaks volumes in any language, or both.