Sydney Film Festival: I Killed My Mother

by Katia Nizic 06 June 2010 19:36 Filmink Festival Coverage

Spoiler: He doesn't actually kill his mother

As an earlier blog post pointed out, Xavier Dolan has made a couple of impressive pictures which belie his young age. It's easy to get caught up in the back story of this film. Dolan was only 17 when he penned I Killed My Mother, 19 when he directed and starred in it, never having produced even a short film before, and largely funded the project via inheritance money. But one shouldn't let this story obscure from the fact that this is a terrific and resonant piece of filmmaking.  

Dolan plays Hubert, a brash 16-year-old who has a fractious relationship with his single mother, Chantal (superbly played by Anne Dorval) where they barely speak civilly at the best of times. He eyes with contempt her bad taste in clothing, kitschy décor and basically looks down upon her entire middlebrow, lower-class existence. At first, the petulant Hubert seems at fault but we see how Chantal can be just as exasperating at times. In one hilarious scene she invites Hubert to ride with her so he can rent a movie, but when she grows impatient waiting for him in the car, she marches into the video store and screams at him before she drives away because she feels he took too long. Eventually the fighting becomes so bad that Chantal enrols Hubert in boarding school which separates him from his highschool boyfriend.

For me, this film felt too intentionally arty at times, revealing a young filmmaker with an exciting imagination but who is still trying to hone their own voice in terms of visuals. There are these black-and-white bathroom confessionals which pan around Dolan's model face and seem more akin to a Calvin Klein ad. There are sudden daydreams where he runs through forests and smashes plates. There are slow motion scenes backed by an orchestral score. Some of these artistic flourishes work better and more truthfully than others. But mixed together, it often seems too much.

But what this film does so powerfully is capture the emotions and angst and sadness of these characters. There are parts of the film which are so clued in to how a misunderstood teenager feels and the film doesn't satirise or belittle those feelings. When his mother sends Hubert off to boarding school, he tells her she's ruining his life and he threatens her with the only thing he has -  that when he turns eighteen, he will never speak to her again. Yeah, it's selfish and childish but the scene rings painfully true. Before he turns away he asks his mother, "What would you do if I died today?" He walks away and she says to herself, "I'd die tomorrow."

The film's most touching scene begins as another fight when Hubert learnt his mother has re-enrolled him in boarding school and the argument becomes so heated that you fear for a second, he's going to come close to fulfilling the threat of the film's title. Instead of reaching out to her obviously pained son, Chanel responds by admitting she found out about Hubert and his boyfriend. There is a moment when Hubert softens, overcome by a mixture of fear, relief and longing and you feel for a second that the pair are on the verge of reconnecting. But then Chanel rejects him, not because she objects to his sexuality but because she is so hurt that her son does not trust her with that part of his self-identity. The scene, and that moment lost, is quietly devastating.

If I have made the film sounds like it's all heavy-going, it's not. It's filled with moments of comic black humour. One night Hubert returns home from boarding school high on ecstasy to express his love to his mother. While the scene has you laughing, it is also a heartbreaking depiction of the way people use drugs to help them reveal the truth. In a scene toward the end, the boarding school's headmaster makes some insulting insinuations toward Chantal and Dorval gives an unforgettable performance, letting lose her frustrations as a mother and love for her son in an emotional explosion which is both deeply hilarious and deeply poignant.

For me, this film was ultimately about the struggle with the paradox of loving our parents without actually liking them. Sometimes it is the people we love the deepest who hurt us the most profoundly and understand us the least. And this film was about all those small moments where we desperately hope to connect, the endless failures and the tiny triumphs.