The Current Cinema - Rod Bishop examines the career of Xavier Dolan (after viewing THE DEATH AND LIFE OF JOHN F DONOVAN, Canada, 2018)

Xavier Dolan

You’re 30 years old and screening your eighth feature film at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. 

During the past 10 years, six of your films have been invited to Cannes and you’ve won a total of eight awards on the Croisette.

Your latest film is in Official Competition and you’ve just woken up to the reviews. Jon Frosch of The Hollywood Reporter is bellowing at you:

“He's baaa-aaack. After the spectacular one-two stumble of his forays outside Canada — to France and America — world cinema’s poutiest auteur, 30-year-old Xavier Dolan, returns to his native Quebec for … a dramedy of repressed homosexual desire. If only it were a return to form.”

World cinema’s poutiest auteur? Spectacular stumbles? Films about repressed homosexual desire?

For most of the last decade, Xavier Dolan had been the Cannes wunderkind. 

In 2009, when he was 19-years-old, Dolan’s first feature I Killed My Mother won three awards in the Directors Fortnight. The following year Heartbeats took out the Regards Jeunes Prize in Un Certain Regard. A year later, Laurence Anyways won the Queer Palm Award and Best Actress (Suzanne Clement) in Un Certain Regard.

In 2014, appearing for the first time in the Official Competition, Mommy shared the Jury Prize with Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language. 

In his acceptance speech, Dolan paid tribute to Jury President Jane Campion:

“To Jane Campion: as far as I can remember, The Piano is the first film I watched when I asked my step-mother: What should I watch? And she said: The Piano. It was the first of many, many films that I watched and defined who I am and how I love…and to stand today on the same stage with you is nothing short of extraordinary. Your Pianomade me want to write roles for women, beautiful women with soul, and will, and strength. Not victims, not objects.”

Then he spoke to his generation of filmmakers:

“…I just want to tell you that, despite people who are entitled to their own taste and will dislike what you do, and some who will dislike who you are, let’s hold on to our dreams because together we can change the world, and the world needs to be changed. Touching people, making them cry, making them laugh, can change their minds. And changing minds, changes lives slowly, and changing lives means changing the world. Not only politicians and scientists can change it, but artists as well. They’ve been doing it forever.” 

Two years later, in 2016, the Cannes tide turned dramatically on the wunderkind.

Despite winning the Grand Prix in the Official Competition, It’s Only the End of the World received scathing reviews. 

Canada’s own Globe and Mail:

“This year, however, it seemed that the sheen had come off the golden boy as critics labelled It's Only the End of the World a "frequently excruciating dramatic experience” (Variety) and "disappointment, even for the Dolan faithful" (Hollywood Reporter).

 “A stellar cast of French actors is mainly left to run lines and hyperventilate.”(The New Yorker)

“The enfant-terrible director Xavier Dolan is at his most irritating in It's Only the End of the World.” (The Times of London)

“It's not, as the mockery goes, the end of the world for Dolan, but it's hardly something we wish to remember this golden boy by, either.” (Bangkok Post)

Before Cannes had finished in 2016, most of the reviews were out. Dolan reportedly told the press to “chill out”. Incensed, when Dolan’s prize was announced at the Awards Ceremony, the press room at Cannes burst into a loud chorus of boos.

What happened here? How do you go from Cannes golden boy to an object of vilification in two years? How do you win the Jury Prize in 2014 and then in 2016, the Grand Prix (Cannes’ second most important award) and have the press room greet the announcement in an eruption of boos? 

Is it that bad? Of course, it isn’t. How did it win the Grand Prix? Because the Jury, led by George Miller, thought it deserved to win. 

Perhaps Dolan had been walking a critical knife-edge for all of his short, prodigious career. 

A glance through the reviews of his first five films reveals a lot of adulation for the multi-hyphenated director-actor-writer-producer-editor-costume designer. He had, more than once, been compared with Orson Welles as “prodigiously gifted”, a “genius”, creator of “masterpieces”. 

But there were also negatives, even from critics who liked the films: “indulgent”, “arduous”, “immature”, “repetitive”, “overheated”, “self-important artistic masturbation”.

It didn’t take much for those who had previously praised his work to turn against him.

Is it a coincidence that Mommy, his breakthrough into the Cannes big-time in 2014 is his least “gay” work? That his talents were so undeniable, the “gay stuff” just had to be put up with? Fassbinder, with whom Dolan shares many sensibilities, made gay films and he was venerated as a filmmaker. But were Fassbinder’s gay films the source of his reputation or did that come from his many non-gay works?

Mommy aside, Dolan doesn’t make non-gay films. And his gay sensibility is very in-your-face. It’s a rage. It’s the same rage shown in Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011) with its simmering distain at gayness not being accepted as normal the way heterosexuality is thought natural.

I don’t know if latent homophobia among film critics is to blame. It seems too simple an answer, but in the absence of others, it’s a thought hard to avoid. 

Dolan certainly doesn’t have the same problem with heterosexuality. Acting in Joel Edgerton’s A Boy Erased, he has said: “But when I read the script for “Boy Erased,” I was so impressed that Joel would adapt this story as a heterosexual. That he would feel such a deep connection with the story moved me in a way that felt like a departure from something.”

Dolan skipped Cannes in 2018 and debuted his next, the $35 million The Death and Life of John F. Donovan in his home country of Canada at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The knives came out again. 

“A work of stunning technique eclipsed by its increasingly jaw-dropping solipsism … How Deep Into Xavier Dolan’s Navel Dare We Gaze?”(Variety)

“[A] half-baked, cumbersome, overlong psychodrama…The story climaxes with The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony," a blowhard fanfare of hollow triumphalism masquerading as a profound commentary on the human condition. The parallels with Dolan's latest film hardly need spelling out here.” (The Hollywood Reporter)

“Dolan’s English-language debut whinges about personal neuroses rather than probing homophobia or celebrity.” (The Globe and Mail)

Poster for the four hour version

Anyone lucky enough to have seen The Death and Life of John F. Donovan knows this is exactly what Dolan’s film does – it consistently probes homophobia and the constraints placed on film celebrities by press and audiences who claim ownership over their very lives.

I say lucky enough, because these reviews and many other vivisections by so-called critics have left the remarkable The Death and Life of John F. Donovan - one of the best films I’ve seen in a while - on the shelf for over a year. That is, apart from one screening on French television. 

Dolan’s response? Now 30-years-old and with eight features in the can, he shows no interest in this recent critical mauling. He immediately made the low budget Matthias and Maxime, a film about two friends (one played by Dolan) who kiss on screen during a student film shoot. Dolan’s character is about to leave for two years in Melbourne but the two friends find the emotions raised by their kiss have destabilized their lives.

Debuting in Cannes this year*, the reviews for Matthias and Maxime were the usual mixture of condescension, admiration and loathing. Apart from being accused of personifying “world cinema’s poutiest auteur” and not having a “return to form”, others read:

“Matthias & Maxime is filmed all in tightly pressed close-up, faces looming, constantly erupting into furious rows, shouting and shrieking. It’s like being at the worst party ever.”(London Evening Standard)

 “Matthias and Maxime marks his return to French language film making after his debut in English, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan… which even Dolan’s fiercest defenders would concede as a disaster … Dolan may not have made his masterpiece, but this is more than fine for now.”(The Sunday Times)

“A wistful, low-key love-and-friendship study, and something of a back-to-basics reset after his elaborate English-language misfire The Death and Life of John P.[sic] Donovan,it feels at once younger and older, sweeter and more seasoned, than Dolan’s last few films… A decade into a lively career, the enfant terrible has become his own master.”(Variety)

You’d think if you were going to declare an enfant terrible had become his own master, you’d at least spell the name of his previous “misfire” correctly.

*Matthias and Maxime also screened at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival.