After the misstep that was Tom At The Farm, there was hope that Mommy would be a return to form for the prolific twenty-six-year old writer-director Xavier Dolan. His latest might be more engaging than its troubled predecessor but it has signs that the talented Canadian is losing himself to self-indulgence.
Diane (Dorval) is a forty-six-year-old widow whose financial pressure is exasperated when her son Steve (Pilon) is kicked out of an institution for setting fire to the cafeteria, injuring a young boy in the process. Diagnosed with ADHD, the fifteen-year-old’s hyperactivity leads to bouts of violence, leaving his mother at times cowering in the basement. However, when they make friends with neighbour Kyla (Clément), a former teacher now housebound, she has a calming nature on the warring two…
Mommy shared the Jury Prize with Jean-Luc Godard’s terrible Goodbye To Language at last year’s Cannes, but it’s another example of votes going to the director’s work to date, rather than the film on screen. Mommy is needlessly awkward. The opening is higgledy-piggledy with a long-winded caption introduction that doesn’t really have much say in what transpires, followed by narratively fractured scenes. But it’s the aspect ratio that grabs the eye, cutting the usual 16:9 to 4:3. This exists for two reasons. One is to visually confine and constrict the characters, but there are better, subtler ways to suggest tension (the framing, the location, the sets). The second reason is for a montage to Oasis’ Wonderwall where a happy Steve reaches towards the camera and 'pulls' the screen wider. Dolan has always being a bit showy – lobbing in slow motion montages set to eighties tunes just for the hell of it – but he’s never set out to make sure the audience know how hard he’s working.
"Loving people doesn’t save them" is the theme that is the spine of the film but Dolan still can’t help long stretches feeling unfocussed with inessential scenes seemingly included because they mean a lot to Dolan. For periods there doesn’t seem to be an endpoint and attention can wander and interest can diminish. The one hundred and thirty nine minutes are felt.
But Mommy has energy. With an atmosphere of perpetual agro, like ten Eastenders episodes running concurrently at full volume, there’s an inescapable tension throughout. Pilon is a time bomb and Dorval’s ‘Die’ is barely hanging on, doing her best to keep an even keel. Underneath the argy-bargy nature of the relationship there’s just a faint whiff of sex to add to the mix. With those two going at it hammer and tongs, it’s testament to Clément’s tender performance that she’s even noticeable; that she outshines the two makes her quiet performance one of the best of the year so far.