Xavier Dolan’s Mommy will sweep awards, Brendan Kelly writes
Xavier Dolan’s gem will sweep up this year at the Jutras, Gazette writer predicts
Will the 2015 Jutra Awards be the official consecration of notre ami Xavier Dolan? Short answer? Yes. Longer answer? Well, do you have a few minutes? The first thing to get out of the way is that, in my humble opinion, Dolan’s Mommy is going to totally and utterly dominate La soirée des Jutra, which takes place Sunday at the Monument-National and will be broadcast live on ICI Radio-Canada Télé.
Mommy has the most Jutra nominations, with 10. Yes, it’s true that Stéphane Lafleur’s inspired Tu dors Nicole, Ricardo Trogi’s fun 1987 and Dolan’s previous film, the gripping psychological thriller Tom à la ferme, have almost as many nominations. Tu dors Nicole has nine and 1987 and Tom each have eight. But I wouldn’t bet the farm on those other films winning in any of the major categories.
Mommy has all the momentum, having just nabbed nine trophies at the Canadian Screen Awards, including virtually all of the major ones, notably for best film, direction, screenplay, actor, actress and supporting actress. It didn’t win for supporting actor simply because this emotionally charged drama about a mother, her volatile teen son and their best friend doesn’t feature any other male actor with enough screen time to warrant being nominated for supporting actor.
Also the Jutra voters have often showed a penchant for letting one film sweep. From Crazy (14 wins) in 2006 to Incendies (nine wins) in 2011 to Rebelle (eight wins) in 2013, the Jutra Soirée has often been dominated by one favourite — and the awards ceremony has a good track record of rewarding the flick that was indeed the film of the year.
And there’s no doubt that 2014 was l’année Mommy. Dolan’s fifth feature had its world première at the Cannes Film Festival last year and it was the buzz on the Croisette that propelled the film into the upper echelons of the global art-film circuit. It was his fourth feature to unspool at the world’s most prestigious film festival and his first in official competition.
It earned rave reviews from critics everywhere and ended up winning the Jury Prize, which is essentially the equivalent of the bronze medal at Cannes. It also became Dolan’s biggest hit ever on his home turf, ringing up $3.1 million at the box office chez nous in 2014, making it far and away the top-grossing Quebec film of the year.
This came at a time when local films continue to struggle to find audiences. The closest contender was 1987, which grossed $2.4 million in 2014.
The encouraging thing about Mommy’s success at the cash register was that moviegoers shelled out their hard-earned cash to see a film that is not a formulaic commercial movie. There are no car chases in Mommy, no stupid lowest-common-denominator jokes, no popular local standup comics in lead roles.
It’s a wrenching, disturbing drama about three damaged individuals — a foul-mouthed, bluecollar single mom (Anne Dorval), a teen boy with attention-deficit issues and loads more emotional baggage (Antoine Olivier Pilon), and a shy woman from across the street recovering from her own private trauma (Suzanne Clément).
To me, there’s a lesson to be learned here for Quebec filmmakers. So many of the movies designed to score big at the ticket wicket have underperformed in recent years. Just look at the poor results for Le Vrai du faux and Les Maîtres du suspense last year.
The lesson? Make a good movie and the public will come, even if, like Mommy, it’s shot in a 1:1 aspect ratio that results in a tiny boxlike image on the screen.
Oddly, the one guy who objects most vociferously to this argument of mine is Dolan himself. I met him at a Telefilm Canada event the other day where he was picking up a cheque for $40,000, the money that came with the Guichet d’or award for the topgrossing French-language Canadian film of the year.
He looked downright peeved when I called Mommy an art film.
“I don’t entirely agree with you,” Dolan said.
“Mommy, you look at the script, it’s just so conventional, such classic writing. It’s really the American paradigm of Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, then Act 4 resolution of conflict. You think of it as artsy because it’s shot on a square. What else? It’s got Wonderwall. A Céline Dion song. It’s bright, it’s
colourful, it’s got lots of musical montages.
“Between you and I, and between everyone else, it’s not an auteur film. It’s an auteur film because I wrote it. In the minds of people who haven’t seen it, they might see it as an auteur film. But I think the reason why it was seen by people is because they went out of curiosity and they realized it was much more accessible than they thought it was.
“What we’ve been doing in this industry for the past years is we’ve been digging deeper and deeper this chasm between the movies that are commercial and the films that we call auteur films. Which is a curse. In my conception of things, there are movies that work and there are movies that don’t work. I think people want to see good films.”
Trust Dolan to neatly sum up the central contradiction of Quebec film right this second. The box office has been dropping for several years following the incredible ticket-sales boom of the first decade of this century. Local films accounted for 5.9 per cent of overall ticket sales in the province in 2014, down from the all-time high of 18.2 per cent in 2005 and 12.8 per cent as recently as 2009.
Audiences here have turned their backs on most auteur films. So if you look at the films in the running for the Jutra for best film, only Mommy and 1987 generated strong sales.
Robert Morin’s 3 histoires d’Indiens, Tom à la ferme and Tu dors Nicole didn’t get seen by anywhere near as many people.
Small art films like Bunker (completely ignored by Jutra voters), La Garde (one nomination for makeup) and Love Projet (nominated for best hair!) disappeared without a trace.
Denys Arcand used to specialize in what I’d call accessible auteur films but his latest, the critically drubbed Le Règne de la beauté, was a disappointment at the box office and also failed to make it on to the Jutra radar, with not even a single nomination. (The other major film to get the Jutra cold shoulder was Le vrai du faux, which also was shut out.)
So there are Quebec movies that worked last year — essentially Mommy and 1987 — and then the others that didn’t work, which, sadly, was most everything else.
Just as sadly for Tu dors Nicole, 1987 and Tom à la ferme, the one film that’s going to work with Jutra voters is Mommy. And yes, apparently M. Dolan is going to be happy to soak up the love at yet another awards ceremony.
“I’ve only been to two (awards ceremonies with Mommy),” Dolan said.
“There was Cannes and then there was the Canadian Screen Awards. I’m not going to tell you I’m jaded … 'Oh no, not again.’ I’m happy that Mommy is acknowledged by the Jutras and the community and we’ll see who wins. And I’ll be happy if we win more awards.”
La Soirée des Jutra will be broadcast live on ICI Radio-Canada Télé on Sunday at 8 p.m.
Mommy, you look at the script, it’s just so conventional, such classic writing. It’s really the American paradigm of Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, then Act 4 resolution of conflict. XAVIER DOLAN