Teen trauma

Young filmmaker Xavier Dolan’s J’ai tué
ma mère lives up to the Cannes hype with
raw emotional honesty

FRACTURED FAMILY: J’ai tué ma mère

by MALCOLM FRASER

Like Star Trek (if only in this respect), Xavier Dolan’s J’ai tué ma mère comes burdened with a whole mess of advance hype. The first feature from the precocious Montreal-based writer/director/producer/actor (in case you’ve missed this detail, the guy turned 20 this year fer chrissakes) won no less than three prizes at the Director’s Fortnight series at this year’s Cannes festival. Though cinematically uneven, the film taps into an unusually raw nerve of feeling.

Dolan plays Hubert, a gay 17-year-old ridden with angst, which he furiously unloads on his hopelessly uncool mother (Anne Dorval, a familiar face from Quebec film and TV). The perpetually pouty teen has a laid-back boyfriend (François Arnaud) with a much hipper mom (Patricia Tulasne) and a teacher (Suzanne Clément) who struggles to maintain a professional distance from him despite a strong personal connection.

But most of the film consists of knock-down, drag-out fights between mother and son, so brutally real that you’re constantly torn between feeling for the kid’s acute hormonal angst, sympathizing for the mom’s role as verbal punching bag, and laughing at the absurdity of their shared penchant for blowing everyday disagreements into operatic battles. Dorval elevates the animal print-wearing, tanning salon-attending, Cheetos-munching, banality-spouting mom beyond a caricature into a real and sympathetic character, even in her utter cluelessness (her shock at the discovery of her son’s blatantly obvious sexuality is pricelessly painful).

The cinematic style is what you might expect from a director who was still a teenager when he made the film—we’re talking heavy-handed symbolic imagery, bold formal experiments for no particular reason, and narrative threads left hanging. The strength of the film is in its raw emotional honesty, and the courage with which Dolan and Dorval go to embarrassingly real places. In their inability to get along, they capture something fundamental to drama, the tragic but hilarious existential dilemma of being human—they can’t live with or without each other.

The teen angst angle makes it somehow universal—for anyone who remembers adolescence, it’s a cringe-inducing reminder of when you couldn’t control your feelings, and judging from the comments of the moms among my fellow critics, for new parents, it’s a grim omen of what lies ahead.

J’AI TUÉ MA MÈRE OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, JUNE 5