J'ai tué ma mère (2009)
Directed by Xavier Dolan

Film Review

At 19, Xavier Dolan made what is possibly the most auspicious directing debut of the decade with this frank and perceptive film about the brittle relationship between a single mother and her adolescent son.  J'ai tué ma mère (a.k.a. I Killed My Mother) is to Dolan what Les 400 coups (1959) was to François Truffaut - the similarities between the two films are quite striking and probably not entirely accidental.  Drawing heavily on his own experiences, Dolan endows his characters with a blistering sense of reality, and the fact that Dolan (an established child actor) plays the principal teenager adds to its autobiographical authenticity.  This is the story that Dolan had been dying to tell since he was in his mid-teens (he claimed to have written the script when he was 16), but what is most remarkable is the boldness, daring and originality of his mise-en-scène.  It is a film that literally takes your breath away and reignites your zest for moviegoing.

J'ai tué ma mère is far from perfect from a technical point of view, and Dolan is not immune from employing the kind of heavy-handed stylistic clichés that a more mature filmmaker would flinch at, but there is such human feeling in the writing and acting that it is hard not to succumb to its charms.  Dolan is at his best and worst when his creativity takes him over completely.  No one who watches this film can fail to be startled by its gloriously over-the-top centrepiece, in which the main character and his boyfriend passionately make love whilst splashing paint over a wall, à la Jackson Pollock - it is like some frenzied, multi-coloured Pagan ritual, a burst of wild exuberance swathed in poetry and tenderness.  Sadly, many of the other bouts of artistic overload that punctuate the narrative resemble tacky pop videos from the 1980s, and Dolan's gratuitous use of slow-motion soon becomes repetitive and irksome.  Evidently, self-restraint is far more of a stranger to Dolan than uninhibited self-expression.

J'ai tué ma mère certainly has its moments of toe-curling abandon but set against these are a screenplay and performances that are consistently excellent and provide a genuinely moving portrayal of a mother's failure to sustain a meaningful rapport with her son as he approaches adulthood and becomes increasingly cocooned in his own crisis of identity.  It would be ludicrous to expect a 19-year-old to deliver a perfect piece of cinema at his first attempt, and so we can easily forgive Dolan his wilder artistic indulgences, particularly as a few of them turn out so brilliantly.  It is hard to say what impresses more: Dolan's obvious awareness of the complexity and fragility of human relationships or his immense creative flair.  In either case, Xavier Dolan grabs the mantle of Wunderkind as if it were made especially for him and leaves us in eager anticipation of his next cinematic eruption.

Film Synopsis

Hubert Minel is a 16-year-old French Canadian student who lives in Montreal with his mother, Chantale.  Since her husband walked out on her nine years ago, Chantale has struggled to bring up her son single-handedly, but he shows her little gratitude for her efforts.  Hubert loves his mother but he hates being her son and is desperate to leave home.  At school, he is so embarrassed by her that he pretends she is dead.  The strained mother-son relationship deteriorates further when a friend of Chantale tells her that her son, Antonin, has been in a gay relationship with Hubert for several months.  When his mother refuses to allow him to have his own apartment, Hubert moves in with a (female) schoolteacher who has developed a fondness for him and is keen to foster his literary talents.  Having been lured into a trap by his mother, with his estranged father acting as the bait, Hubert soon finds himself dispatched to a strict boarding school...