J'ai tué ma mère (2009)
The Cannes International Film Festival (aka Le Festival International du Film de Cannes) is one of the most publicized and important film festivals to occur around the world. Film makers are invited to have their films compete in a selected category, and judges are chosen for each category to pick the best film. This is obviously a very competitive festival and only the best directors are selected. This year's festival began yesterday with a showing of Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, and it will continue up until the 27th of May. One of the films being showed was created by a Québecois who gained fame when his film was selected as Canada's feature film for the Best Foreign Film category at the 82nd Academy Awards. Not to mention it was nominated twenty-seven times for awards, and won ten other ones. All this was accomplished by a twenty-year old man at the time named Xavier Dolan. The film he wrote for, acted in, and directed was J'ai tué ma mère, or I Killed My Mother in English. Since Dolan's Laurence Anyways was selected to compete in the category Un Certain Regard, I thought I would review J'ai tué ma mère. Now, bare with me, I haven't watched the film in a little while, but I did see it a few times so I should still be able to review it.
The film stars Anne Dorval, François Arnaud, and Xavier Dolan. It is considered a semi-biographical film, and it's a dramatic film. It tells the life of an adolescent, Hubert Minel (Dolan), living in Montréal with his single mother, Chantale Lemming (Dorval). His relationship with his mom is... well, not very good. The two have personalities that clash, and the film is filled with scenes that show their conflicting relationship, whether it be with them yelling at each other, or just the tense atmosphere that fills the room when the two are together. It doesn't help that Hubert is homosexual and going out with a man, Antonin Rimbaud (Arnaud) without telling his mother. The film just goes in depth of a mother and son relationship, with the bad and good extremes.
I really liked the film. It's a pretty simply premise, not anything super complicated, and the acting and writing is great. I'm not the biggest fan of the ending because I find it just ends and is left a little too ambiguous for my ending, but as I said, it has a great atmosphere to it. When Xavier Dolan and Anne Dorval are yelling at each other at the top of their lungs, you feel it. Even when they aren't talking, as I said before, you feel it. You see how they try and get along, but the two just end up in conflict. I have a great relationship with my parents, but my older sibling had a tough time getting along with my parents when they were in their adolescence. I see the realism in the story with the constant contrasts of a parent-offspring relationship. I also have friends who admitted they were gay, and it isn't easy. One of my friends told me they couldn't tell their mother they were gay because she would have blown up in their face. Another one was more at ease with their bisexuality, but said they would never talk about it with their parents, and surely not their mother. Again, I can see the realism in the story with that aspect. I mean, it is a semi-biographical film (Dolan is gay in real life), and it is a look on Dolan's life, so it makes sense it feels real, but Xavier Dolan was really able to capture that. I experience the hardships of school, but could I demonstrate it on the big screen? Not likely.
Out of ten stars, I would probably give it a seven point five. It's been a while since I watched it, and I really did like it, but certain elements seemed lacking at the end. I find Hubert's boyfriend was not brought to his full potential in the writing, and as I mentioned, I found the ending just too ambiguous for my liking. Still, it's worth looking into. It's better than the average film, and the acting is top notch.
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