Xavier Dolan and his continuing MOMMY problems come to the fore once more

Xavier Dolan, the French-Canadian boy-wonder is at it again. The currently 25-year-old writer/director -- I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats, Laurence Anyways (we haven't been theatrically graced yet with 2013's Tom at the Farm) -- is still having some trouble growing up. Hell, so do we all. But most of us do not make overlong, boring and repetitive movies (yes, with some brilliant stuff in them, now and again) out of the experience. MOMMY, Dolan's latest endeavor, is yet another look, in pointlessly small-screen mode (more of this later) at an extremely troubled relationship between mother and son.

M. Dolan, pictured at left (photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez, courtesy of Getty Images), generally chooses some excellent actors to use as bait and gives them surprising, often shocking stuff to say and do. Initially, we're hooked. And then, little by little -- at least for those of us who want more than a lot of repeated yelling, cursing and getting all in-your-face -- we become so annoyed and tired of it all that we slowly remove ourselves from that hook. And so it is here: for every fine acting moment and bit of choice dialog, there are several more that grow awfully wearisome.

We should probably begin our critique with the opening credit explanation that Dolan feeds us, explaining that his movie is set in some slightly distant future when Canada has passed a new law that, if I am remembering correctly, gives parents the right to hospitalize their problemed offspring as wards of the state. I am assuming he must do this because, as Canada now stands, what happens in the movie could not happen without this slightly "otherwise" circumstance. But since the film is all about fraught relations between mother (Anne Dorval, above) and teenage child (Antoine-Olivier Pilon, below), a not particularly unusual problem, one would think that the filmmaker could have handled this without this pointless if-things-were-otherwise element.

Further, Dolan has elected to shoot almost all of his film in an aspect ratio the IMDB calls 1:1. This is ridiculously narrow, like watching an 8-1/2 x 11 piece of paper on screen. (Even more so because we are always aware that the movie's frame is not properly filled out.) Well, thought I, he'll soon open up to wider proportions. Hah. We wait almost two hours before the filmmaker finally decides to grace us with width -- and then it's only for a brief fantasy segment in which the characters appear to be have aged into better versions of their former selves. Ah, a few feel-good moments thanks to wide-screen!

Otherwise, Mommy is mostly all screaming and fighting and then making up (briefly) before starting all over again. A neighbor (Suzanne Clément, above) who has her own problems -- speech and communication among them -- gets involved with our pair, as mom's friend and son's "caretaker," and this of course leads to further "fraughtness." After now seeing four of Dolan's films, several things seem clear. Our boy likes 'em lengthy (this one runs two hours and twenty minutes) and repetitive. There are enough of what you'd call plot and content here to last an hour or so. The rest is filler, though handled at times with great passion.

Passion, along with connection and relationships, are Dolan's aces-in-the-hole -- even if all these seem to have no real consequences along the way -- until at last we get to the point that the filmmaker has been promising since that opening credit explanation. Consequence does not even exist, it seems, regarding the poor teenager whose face our boy earlier burned almost beyond recognition in the group home in which they both lived. But I guess that's OK somehow because, hey, it's all been so "passionate." If you've seen several of Dolan's oeuvre and then encounter Mommy, you may want, as do I, to make a small suggestion: Fucking grow up, Xavier! Or at least give us movies that do.

Mommy, from Roadside Attractions, opens today in New York City (at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center) and in the West Los Angeles at The Landmark.  It was, by the way, the Canadian entry for this year's Best Foreign Language Film.

In LAURENCE ANYWAYS Xavier Dolan continues his lengthy examination of the Canadian "other"

Now that we've seen three of French-Canadian actor/director/
writer Xavier Dolan's full-length films, one thing -- in addition to the main character's "otherness" as a homosexual or would-be trans-gender -- does stand out. Shorter is definitely better, as M. Dolan appears to have some trouble staying focused. His first film (which remains his best), I Killed My Mother (J'ai tué ma mère), all about a fraught mom/son relation-ship, ran only 96 minutes but still began to ramble toward the finale; his follow-up, Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires) extended to 101 minutes and tracked a kind of doomed threesome/would-be love affair with the focus and point alternately sharp and woozy; now, with LAURENCE ANYWAYS, that focus is on a seemingly happy, if a little wild, male school teacher who one day, quite out of the blue, confesses to his girl his raging need to become a woman. This one lasts two hours and 48 minutes.

Perhaps TrustMovies was expecting too much from this film -- something like a real and at least somewhat deep look into the why and how of the transgender experience. Instead we get a very lengthy movie about this "odd couple" that -- despite all the ability that the very fine actor Melvil Poupaud musters here (it's a lot) and the terrific actress Suzanne Clément (who matches Poupaud moment for moment) -- fuck and fight and split, then do it all over, again and again, throughout this oddly "surface" film. Neither as writer nor director, even with as able performers as he has here, can M. Dolan (shown above) manage to delve to any depth. By the end of the film, we know about as much as we did going in. If the filmmaker's intent is to keep the mystery of transgender desire ever mysterious, he has succeeded in spades. I am not even certain that you could call Laurence at any point in the film actually transgendered, as he seems to have a quite a bit of trouble parting with his penis. (And if you've ever seen M. Poupaud's, you'll immediately understand why.)

Because of this inability to connect thoughtful dialog to interesting visuals, what we mostly get are views like the above and below, in which M. Poupaud appears to be, uh, ill at ease, or maybe just pensive, or perhaps too hot or too cold. It is asking an awful lot of this good actor to fill in so many blanks. (To view M. Poupaud in one of his finest roles, watch him in Ozon's Time to Leave.)

Ditto Ms Clement, shown below, who has a whopping good scene with a waitress over brunch in a restaurant. It's fierce and funny and nasty and real. But then it goes on long enough to make you realize that, by this time, one of the other diners would have picked up Ms Clement bodily and thrown her out of the place. Dolan doesn't always know, simply for the sake of believability, when to call a halt to a scene.

Our hero is so very self-involved (a trait possessed by all of the Dolan's leading characters, and in fact most of his characters in general) that he becomes something of a pain in the ass. I suppose that anyone this unhappy with his gender identity would indeed be self-involved. How could he not? Still, we'd like to experience him a little more fully. So the choice of where he goes and what he does and whom he sees and so forth determines how fully we get to view and understand him. M. Dolan is far too circumspect in what he allows his character to negotiate.

Wherever he goes, home to dad and mom (interesting work from Nathalie Baye), to his girl, to a bar, our hero seem to get into a fight -- verbal or otherwise. Finally, it's refreshing, if annoying, to see him with a new girl with whom he simply goes into heavy withdrawal. Overall, the character comes off as a something of an entitled twat. Which is not, I suspect, the kind of "woman" he wanted to become.

The filmmaker's ending, by the way -- taking us back to how this couple first met -- is just lovely. Or it would be in more of a old-fashioned, sentimental love story that tugs the heart strings. At this point, you begin to wonder if that is indeed what Dolan meant his movie to be. In any case, Laurence Anyways (the title get its last-minute moment, in a verbal manner, similar to the way in which Frances Ha got hers, visually), from Breaking Glass Pictures, makes its DVD and Blu-ray debut today.

Xavier Dolan's HEARTBEATS tracks a doomed, screwy, one-sided love affair

Stay away from the wealthy. That's just one of the many life lessons viewers might garner from HEARTBEATS -- the droll, slow (and full of slo-mo), alternately funny/sad new movie from Xavier Dolan, the fellow who gave us I Killed My Mother (a film TrustMovies still has not seen. When's it finally gonna get a real release?). Dolan's new one tells of gay boy/straight girl best friends who simultaneously notice the curly strawberry-blond locks of a sexily angelic young man (Niels Schneider, below) for whom they both tumble in absolute-forever-after love. They then spend the rest of the movie trying crazily, vainly to consummate that love.

Anyone who has ever carried a torch for someone unattainable will probably fall hard for Heartbeats, and legitimately so, for Dolan -- pictured on the poster above: he wrote, directed, produced and stars in the movie -- absolutely captures the incredible need, the attendant pain, the irrational jealousies, the desire to please and everything else that goes along with this kind of must-have-but-can't fixation.

And because both Francis (Dolan's character) and his best friend Marie (Monia Chokri, above) have set their sites on the love object Nicolas, the movie also delivers a secondary story about how friendship wanes when one of those friends is bound to lose. In real life, friendships tend to include one person who is more forceful and another who hangs back, thus complementing each other nicely. Not here. Both Marie and Francis go after what they want with nails out and teeth bared. But while they are perfectly happy to let each other know what they want, they can't quite reveal their feelings to the love object himself.

All this makes for some fun, a modicum of pain, gorgeously compo-sed shots with enough slow-motion to sink a lesser movie -- Dolan does slo-mo about as well as any director I've seen, outside of maybe Johnnie To -- and lot of frustration, some of which, unfortu-nately, may be felt by viewers. At 102 minutes, Heartbeats is fifteen minutes too long for what it has to say. Which is a shame, because it says (and shows) things quite well until it begins to sag around the two-thirds point.  It perks again, fortunately, for the finale -- which offers a momentary glimpse of independent cinema's favorite French bad boy, Louis Garrel. Dolan's choice of music is excellent, too -- particularly if you're a fan of the song Bang Bang.

From IFC Films, Heartbeats begins its theatrical run this Friday, February 25, at the IFC Center in NYC, and will simultaneously be available via IFC On-Demand (starting Wednesday, February 23).