DISCIPLINE FROM DOLAN
Distinct craft in new film
Words fly in Xavier Dolan’s sixth film, 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 late French playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce, who died in 1995 from AIDS-related illness, Juste la fin du monde 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 festival that 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 film craft function in dazzling tandem. Having recruited some of France’s top acting talent, Dolan doesn’t fail to put his own distinct stamp on the final product.
Louis (Gaspard Ulliel) is a successful playwright returning home to visit his estranged family, which he has not seen in 12 years. He comes bearing bad news: He is terminally ill. But sharing that information is easier said than done, for his family being family, well, they kind of take over.
There is Louis’s mother (Nathalie Baye), giddy and doting, with flashes of overbearing. Done up in gaudy makeup, she is the visual incarnation of the general exaggeration on display.
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 over to her husband for approval while oversharing the details of their life. Yet it is with her that Louis has the 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 to the subject matter. By framing everything in relentlessly
tight closeup, courtesy of go-to cinematographer André Turpin, he creates a kind of metanarrative 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.