The prolific young writer-director changes tack with this poignant drama of love and longing that also reveals his considerable powers as an actor
The latest from Canadian arthouse wunderkind Xavier Dolan is the story of two men and one kiss. The men are Matthias (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas), a rising star lawyer who is starting to question whether his fast-track career is taking him in the right direction, and Maxime (Dolan), a carer for his addict mother who is about to leave behind a life that has rather stalled in Montreal to make a new start in Australia. The kiss is scripted – the pair find themselves roped into a student film by the insufferable younger sister of a friend. But the emotions it unlocks are real and perplexing, skewing the balance of a friendship that has threaded together the lives of both since they were children.
Matthias & Maxime is recognisably the work of Dolan, who at 31 has crammed a lot of Quebecois melodrama into a relatively short career. His trademark flourishes are very much in evidence: the high-octane onslaught of dialogue, the dominant mothers and invisible fathers, the speeded up montages – his sly way of taking the most hackneyed of all cinema devices and giving it a punky, irreverent energy – and slick changes of aspect ratio (more on which later). But there is also a tonal shift here. The strident, splintering bitterness of some of Dolan’s earlier films (Mommy; It’s Only the End of the World) is replaced by a softer, enveloping melancholy. It’s not exactly gentle in approach – Dolan’s film-making has always been the kind that snaps and bares its teeth – but it’s more forgiving, perhaps, of the flaws in his characters.