Dolan: Mommy (2014)

Pushing through melodrama to out-and-out maximalism, Xavier Dolan’s fifth film returns to the subject matter of his first: mothers and their sons. This time around, we’re presented with Diane (Anne Dorval), a single mother barely managing to keep her son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Plion) in check, with the help of her reclusive neighbor Kyla (Suzanne Clement). Given that Steve is suffering from a pretty extreme case of ADHD, and that we’re dealing with a semi-fictional Quebec in which the State has the power to incarcerate wayward adolescents, the stakes are pretty high. However, Dolan makes them even higher by choosing to shoot the entire film in a 1:1 ratio. Technically, that means that the frame is perfectly square, not unlike the dimensions of an Instagram photo, as numerous critics have noted. When grafted onto a conventional, horizontal screen, though, it looks even more distorted – vertical, rather than merely square - and more like a SmartPhone screen, even if Dolan’s compositions often feel drawn straight from Instagram. In any case, it’s the ideal film to be watched on a SmartPhone, just because of how scrupulously Dolan’s ratio tends to remove sight as the primary point of access to the story, pulling us so deeply inside each of the character’s personal spaces that it’s more of a haptic than a visual experience, cinema for an era in which screens are more like proprioceptive co-ordinates than objects removed to a contemplative visual distance. It’s become something of a cliché that digital culture renders us closer-yet-more-distant than ever before, but Dolan is largely uninterested in the distance, drawing his characters closer and closer to each other, and the camera closer and closer to them, until it feels as if everything else is drawn into their most personal space as well, even or especially the most distant objects or vistas. As might be expected, that makes for a pretty claustrophobic experience - all the dialogue is shouted, screamed or sung, every song on the 90s-laden soundtrack is played in its entirety, and nothing (or it feels like nothing) is left on the cutting-room floor. Yet there’s also something calm and even cosy at the heart of the claustrophobia as well, as this addiction to closeness seems to unleash a deeper, more elemental yearning in each of the characters, a longing to be one with the beatified mother who presides over it all. Watching it, then, is a bit like experiencing a birth-in-reverse, as Dolan evokes the chaos and confusion of emerging from the womb, the sheer cacaphony, volatility and rawness of the new world, only to reabsorb us back into a liquid, amniotic ambience that makes you realise how much social media and digital culture draws you back towards this one primal longing to be held. Cliched from start to finish, it nevertheless uses cliché to exceed your ability to process it visually, suffocating and smothering you until you’re in precisely the position of Dolan’s characters: oppressed by the film’s closeness, but only because that very closeness means you still haven’t been totally absorbed into it.