Monday 15 May 2017

Juste la fin du monde (Xavier Dolan, 2016)

A gay playwright returns to see his family in Quebec after an absence of 12 years, intending to tell them that he's dying. It's a fractious homecoming that doesn't last a day, with constant bickering and back-biting between them making productive communication arduous. But it is the lead character's diffidence that makes it quite impossible, and this is one of the most frustrating things about It's Only the End of the World. He simply does not take a stand, hardly speaking, staring off in reveries of the past when addressed and letting all the sniping wash over him. Considering that his sister is arrested in adolescence, his older brother is a self-important aggressive bully, his sister-in-law a mouse who can hardly get a sentence out and his dithering mother quite unable to control any of it, there isn't anyone at all to empathise with, which was surely not the intention.
Dolan clearly has an inkling of how to spot fractures in family relationships, but the way these are presented is overblown and clumsy, like the observations of a Martian, and disappointingly what you would expect of a director so young who also represents sexual and linguistic minorities and is obviously burdened by that fact. The top-rate cast, including Marion Cotillard and Vincent Cassel are reduced to working with caricatures of personae.
It won the Grand Prix at Cannes, which is one of those frequent cases where the jury wilfully awards something just for being hard work (and therefore not commercial), regardless of whether it actually manages to say anything.

5/10

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