Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know—because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it, it turned to dust in my hand.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Words fly fast and furious in the films of Xavier Dolan, whose dialogue is as acute as his style. But the shouting matches and pregnant silences that exist throughout his filmography are indicative of one overarching theme: his characters’ inability to attain and/or hold onto what they desire. Dolan, however, isn’t interested in exploring only one kind of human desire. From the tumultuous arguments between mother and son in his debut I Killed My Mother (2009) and his latest film Mommy; to the eroticized silences of Heartbeats (2010) and Tom at the Farm (2013); and the lovers’ quarrels in Laurence Anyways (2012), he’s fascinated by different kinds of desire: expressed and repressed, romantic and familial.
His filmography is bookended (so far) by less-ordinary versions of desire: I Killed My Mother and Mommy are rooted less in sexuality than in a sense of comfort and familial love. Certainly, the Oedipal aspects of the mother-son relationships in both those films—Hubert (Dolan) and Chantale (Anne Dorval) in I Killed My Mother, Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) and Diane (Dorval) in Mommy—offer some immediate surface interest: Both are dysfunctional, albeit in distinct ways, with Hubert and Chantale’s relationship being arguably the more tempestuous.
More interesting than that, however, is the constant ebb and flow in terms of who tries for common ground in the dynamic. In I Killed My Mother, that particular desire is there, but neither Hubert nor his mother seem to have the grammar to express it. The gestures they make towards one another—Chantale’s extended arm towards her son; Hubert making her dinner one night; she bringing him to the video store; he planning to buy an apartment to alleviate the tension—ultimately go for naught. Instead, Hubert funnels his inner yearning through ecstasy-fueled late-night rambles, in which he seems ready to burst with a confession regarding his sexual identity, and through taped monologues. It is through these monologues, shot in black & white and close-up, that we are brought inside the head of a character who seems ambivalent about trust and honesty: Though deep down, he wants to reveal his true self both to his mother and to the audience, there’s a hesitance, the camera sometimes pulling away from him. As indulgent, bratty and whiny as these candid confessionals are, they are nevertheless entirely raw and honest, in their own messy way articulating the inexplicable (why did the relationship between these two become so toxic? How does he really feel about his mother?). Even the smallest of gestures that the two make towards one another give the impression that neither Hubert nor his mother thinks anything will change, however much they want it to.
Four films later, Mommy approaches a similar relationship and acts as a mirror to it. Though the mother-son relationship between Steve and Diane in Mommy is ostensibly more functional, communication troubles once again come to the forefront. Perhaps Steve’s behavioral issues are the barrier: Though Diane seems too desperate to get back to a normal life, Steve doesn’t know exactly what that means, but his desire is primarily to protect his mother, even when he’s not actually doing so. When doing research for Mommy, Dolan consulted a doctor to ensure realism to Steve’s actions and situation; after reading part of the screenplay, the doctor concluded that Steve has an attachment disorder, suggesting that he truly doesn’t understand this love from his mother; thus, every gesture will be an effort to gain validation, even though he’ll never feel it. Dolan’s penchant for heightened emotion is even more on point in Mommy than in his debut: The narrow 1:1 aspect ratio expresses the lack of escape for either of them, but the claustrophobia is alleviated from time to time, with the aspect ratio widening to a full 1.85:1 image, their desire ostensibly coming to fruition and crystallizing.
As incisive as Dolan is at examining such familial dynamics, he is even better at voicing the more-traditionally understood brand of desire: love, passion and lust. In the three-hour odyssey of Laurence Anyways, as both Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) and Fred (Suzanne Clément) are forced to deal with the shake-up in their relationship that comes as the result of Laurence’s shifting gender identity, these two characters constantly switch between realism and idealism, neither one truly being able to reconcile with the facts of their situation. Dolan’s filmmaking follows suit: Emotionally ravaging screaming matches and deeply melancholic moments of solitude alternate with occasional moments of colorful ecstasy—scarfs raining from the skies, Visage blasting in a club, water cascading in a room after Fred has read a book of poetry Laurence has left her. In the end, however, their relationship doesn’t last: We’d like to think that love conquers all, but sometimes, in the real world, it simply doesn’t.
The desire Dolan essays in Tom at the Farm, by contrast, is lusty and excruciating: Hitchcock by way of Persona. It presents itself in a homoerotic tension between the titular Tom (Dolan) and Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), the brother of his late lover, each trying to replace one another for different roles, sexual and familial. But as the camera constantly follows Tom around, Dolan inserts an ambiguity regarding his character’s Stockholm syndrome: He desires the normalcy of a relationship he once had, both with his now-dead lover and his family (the latter of which Agathe, the mother of his late lover, also desires), but also wants to escape it. There’s a large discrepancy between what is actually possible or even logical at this point. Despite that tension between Tom and Francis, being with him is out of the question. The same can be said for Francis’s desire to keep Tom on the farm as a stand-in for his brother.
However, it is in Dolan’s second film, Heartbeats, where his many versions of desire converge, expressed in the clearest and most precise fashion. The film primarily focuses on Desire in the sexual sense, but hidden beneath that veneer of superficiality is that same search for consistency and familiarity. This is depicted at the end of the film, as Francis (Dolan) reveals his feelings for the human Adonis Nicolas (Niels Schneider), and Marie (Monia Chokri) reflects on her experiences being in love with the same boy. For Francis, it’s a matter of validation; the sexual attraction is there, to be certain, but he frames his desire as something simple and innocuous: “Winter is coming and I’m going to start having to heat my place, and I think it would just be easier if someone were there with me.” Though the two aren’t completely compatible, the nakedness of that confession implicitly points to a heteronormativity within the film (all the interviews are with people and their heterosexual experiences and desires), a paradigm that Francis doesn’t fit. As for Marie, her goals seem to be to find someone with whom she’s intellectually and emotionally compatible. “It’s not about the sex,” she says. “I don’t care about the sex. What’s important is to wake up with that someone. To spoon with that person. That’s what matters, the spoon.” This yearning for comfort manifest themselves in the visions she sees (and which Dolan shares with us) when staring lustfully at him.
In regards to his explorations of desire, Dolan’s most representative scene is arguably the party scene in Heartbeats, where Nicolas is off dancing at his birthday party with his mother (named Désirée, ironically, and played by Dorval), relegating Francis and Marie to stare off at the two sourly. The camera shoots Nicolas’s dancing in slow motion, enrapturing the viewer in his drunkenly sensual moves, the music and the strobe lights pulsating with each note. It then cuts to Marie, pulling back, her eyes set on him. Turning back to Nicolas, there are images of Michelangelo’s David intercut. We pull back from Francis, equally bewitched, and cut back to Nicolas with Jean Cocteau illustrations of men making love. In this single sequence, Dolan displays all the various kinds of desire that has fascinated him throughout his filmmaking career so far. There’s this inherent lust, slowing down time, the object of your affection flashing before your eyes, drenched in color. It’s intercut with what each character idealizes: the intellectual and the sensual, represented by those artful hallucinations. But the running theme to seemingly all of Dolan’s work is that this kind of desire, no matter how much we want it, is impossible and unattainable. It’s luscious and extravagant in the moment, but neither the characters, nor even the audience, can reconcile with the reality. Then again, Dolan’s films are not necessarily about reality, but about those moments of impossibility. What would happen if these people got what they actually sought? Probably nothing fulfilling in the long-term, simply short-term relief. Dolan’s response, then, is to celebrate his characters’ ecstatic moments in the throes of soaring emotion and burning passion.
2 thoughts on “Fade to Red: The Desire of Xavier Dolan”
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Astonishing essay on Dolan’s work, as a whole, and why he’s such a commanding and needed cinematic storyteller. I love what you said about the splinters of human desire that Dolan explores and the way he shapes his dialog to fit his style as a filmmaker. Your last paragraph is also extremely compelling. ‘Heartbeats’ was the first Dolan film I ever saw, and I always saw it as a visually compelling piece, but an emotionally shallow one; more of a showman’s film…but now I want to rewatch and reevaluate the whole identity of the film.
Amazing job here!