- Interview Xavier Dolan: "What is silent is what is important"
- Cannes Film Festival The chemically irrefutable cinema
That one completes what is probably his best film (even if it is a series) just at the same time that he announces his retirement from the cinema and exhibits his contempt for everything that has been his life so far may seem a provocation. Or the greatest of frivolities. Or, coming from Xavier Dolan (Montreal, 1989), it is possible that it is all at once. Few directors so determined to vindicate for themselves and their cinema, and from the deepest convictions, the value of the superficial, the agony of the everyday and even the tragedy of the frivolous. The Night Logan Woke Up, now premiering at Filmin, is a five-part series based on Michel Marc Bouchard's play that is offered to the viewer as the best and most perfect compendium of the visceral, energetic, euphoric and hallucinated cinema of its author. And, correspondingly, the film ends (which is also a miniseries, we said) and everything ends. It could not be otherwise.
"I'm tired. I don't feel the need to continue with this," he says, takes a second and continues in the same tone he has been exhibiting since the last Sundance festival showed the press the first symptoms of exhaustion. He continues: "I don't understand what good it is to insist on telling stories when everything around them falls apart. Art is useless and dedicating oneself to cinema is a waste of time... I think about what my job consists of and I see myself writing, shooting, editing, in the post-production process... And then traveling the world talking about what I've shot, edited and post-produced... We act as if we have plenty of time and if there's one thing we don't have right now, it's time."
The words are surprising, but not so much either. After all, if the work of this 34-year-old Canadian has been meant by anything, it has been precisely because of its agonizing, desperate, exaggerated and fervently melodramatic gesture. At just 19 years old, he surprised the world and the Cannes Film Festival with a debut written, directed and starring him. I Killed My Mother (2009) burst in as if it were the last imaginable film and behind it came Laurence Anyways (2012), Tom on the Farm (2013), Mommy (2014), Only the End of the World (2016), My Life with John F. Donovan (2018) and Matthias & Maxime (2019). All, in their own way, a point and end to turns with the poison of the family, the discovery of identity, the guilt of being a mother (and child) and the inconvenience of being born. It is cinema at the limit of itself that respects neither conventions nor norms and that reinvents itself at every step it takes.
The Night Logan Woke Up is again the same movie, but with the volume button to everything is left. And then some. "My obsession with family and mother-child relationships is something I find impossible to reason about. We are nothing without family," he says in a break from his despair. He complains if he hears the word melodrama ("It sounds false and my cinema is not like that"), he turns in his chair if the voice of repentance is mentioned next to his melodramatic resignation ("It's not a break it's a cessation") and cries out against the world (and he does it melodramatically) as soon as he is asked about the world. So in general. "It's a great disappointment to spend your life denouncing hate crimes against homosexuals and at the same time seeing how they grow ... We believed that hatred of the different was a thing of the past and we were wrong... I don't understand voting for someone whose message is to despise others for not being like him." Each of the sentences is spoken at the very edge of breath. Exhausting the end of each sentence as if he himself and each of his words were placed on the edge of any abyss. That's how he is and that's how each of his films has been. And forever.
To situate ourselves, the miniseries now presented by Filmin tells the story of a family haunted by the past. Each chapter portrays each of its members. Long ago, something happened that fractured them forever. Dolan shows the wounds and lets the blood gush out. Nothing else. A beating of a homosexual seconded by a rainbow flag that burns is the first image. The brutality of the sequence sets the tone. From the death of the matriarch backwards and as if it were a puzzle, the pieces gradually fit into a narrative that moves with the same ease in the thriller as in the melodrama, leaving at times a gap for laughter by hysterical force. The result is a prodigy of restlessness, nervousness and restlessness. Pure Dolan. The last of each of his last films from 19 to 34 years old.
-And what are you going to do now?
"I will build a house and go there with my friends to take refuge and see how the world burns.
That much is clear.
- cinema
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Learn more