Canada’s Xavier Dolan has already made five movies — and he’s only halfway through his twenties.
Director Xavier Dolan attends the Mommy photo call during the 67th Annual Cannes Film Festival on May 22.
Neilson Barnard / Getty Images Entertainment
Xavier Dolan is the hipster wunderkind of Cannes.
Young, talented, photogenic, and not afraid of a little confrontation, the French-Canadian filmmaker has already made five films at an age when most folks are still trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up. His work's played in the Cannes sidebar before, but his latest, Mommy, is part of this year's main competition, placing the 25-year-old director up against some masters. But Dolan's all grown up, and Mommy is an audacious, stylish, impressive family drama that holds up perfectly well against the films it's been placed with.
Yes, it has its overblown moments that verge on camp, and it invents some frankly bullshit stakes that undercut the emotional impact of the end. Mommy, which Dolan also wrote, opens with titles about how it's set in a fictional Canada in which a controversial law has been passed allowing parents to have their children committed if they are unable to care for them.
That fact lingers over the story like Chekov's improbable gun, providing the main artificial note in a movie that's outsized but otherwise generous with its characters, which include Diane "Die" Després (Anne Dorval), a fortysomething widow who dresses more like a teenager while struggling to raise her teenage son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon), and their neighbor Kyla (Suzanne Clément), a former high school teacher coping with the recent onset of a socially paralyzing stutter. When that invented law does come into play, it feels like a sizable betrayal of the previous presentation of Die. But that's an overall minor quibble. If Dolan hasn't made a great movie yet, he's made a very good one here that assures something masterful's coming soon.
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