Canadian prodigy Xavier Dolan returns with another attention-seeking vehicle
It’s Only the End of the World 15 Cert, 97 min
Xavier Dolan’s new film is going to drive people spare. It’s what he does. The Québecois prodigy, now six features into his career, has developed a signature of thickly applied brushstrokes, song choices so uncool they’re cool, and an artfulness so desperate to be noticed, it’s as if a kindergarten swot is thrusting acrylic portraits of his classmates at you every few seconds. It’s Only the End of the World is five such portraits at a family reunion. Adapted from an old play by the French dramatist Jean-Luc Lagarce, it’s a shouting match in extreme close-up: imagine a French-Canadian August:
Osage County with the editor cycling between one head-shot at a time. The experience is infuriating, but it’s quite clearly supposed to be – it’s about hell being the other people in your own family. Louis (Gaspard Ulliel), the gay youngest brother of the clan, flies in at the start for a long-delayed catch-up with its fellow members. He has something grave to tell them, which we easily guess, but finding the moment is tricky: he’s not even arrived before the ear-bashing starts. His mother (Nathalie Baye) and sister (Léa Seydoux) can’t stop sniping at each other, while older brother Antoine (Vincent Cassel) is an aggressive boor who mostly spends his time staring out of the window, and a dewy-eyed Marion Cotillard plays the timid sister-in-law Louis has never yet met.
The bilious entropy of Louis’s family succeeds in dictating an unconventionally patterned film, however familiar the dysfunction-off might sound. And though Dolan’s predilection for show-offy sequencebuilding gets the better of him time and again, the jumpy quality of its structure is entirely meant to refuse smooth build-up. Dolan’s no Fassbinder, let’s be clear, and makes his dumbest mistake with a dismally trite bit of bird symbolism at the end. There’s no emotional release to it, unlike the crowd-pleasing, officially “better”
Mommy. But the funny thing is, this one’s a more striking failure than that was a success.