Mommy

Mommy (15)

Canada 2014 138 mins Dir: Xavier Dolan Starring Anne Dorval, Antoine-Olivier Pilon, Suzanne Clement

The fifth feature film from prodigious Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan (at the relatively tender age of 26, he’s amassing quite the CV), Mommy is a peculiar – and peculiarly brilliant – melding of social realist story and poetic fable. Think of it as Mike Leigh meets Wes Anderson, right down to the latter’s fondness for messing around with aspect ratios.

The film is set in a near-future version of Canada, where a controversial law known as S-14 allows parents to willingly submit their troubled children to state care without the need of the courts. However, don’t expect any flying cars or futuristic weaponry: Dolan dispenses with this futuristic context in a brief bit of opening text, the remainder of the drama locking us into a claustrophobic war of wills between struggling single mother Diane and her violent, ADHD-affected son Steve (Pilon). The intentionally oppressive 1:1 framing further accentuates the trapped feeling, largely forcing us to focus on no more than one character at any one time and subsequently throwing their emotions into sharper relief.

At the start of the movie, we see Diane retrieving 16-year-old Steve from a juvenile detention centre after he’s set fire to a cafeteria and injured another child. Diane has made the decision to bypass the S-14 law and home-school her aggressive spawn, a rampaging, hormonal teenage id whose every facial tick and manic physical gesture has the audience on tenterhooks. However, Diane soon receives unexpected help in the form of stammering neighbour Kyla (Clement), a former teacher whose distance from her own husband and daughter only serves to emphasise her growing bond with both Steve and his mother.

Picking up on the maternal strand present in Dolan’s earlier films such as I Killed My Mother and Tom at the Farm, the film is at temperamental and mercurial as its warring mother/son protagonists, whose moral choices (sometimes repellent, often empathetic, always recognisably human) provide the film’s fractious sense of energy. Freewheeling between viciously intense scenes of domestic conflict and spaced-out slo-mo sections of wonder (emphasised by an oddly specific soundtrack of late 90s/early 2000s pop hits, including Dido’s White Flag and Oasis’ Wonderwall), the film is possessed of a genuinely unpredictable texture where feelings of anger and joy are continually undercutting one another.

In Dolan’s world, the term ‘mother’ isn’t just used to describe a maternal, genetic bond. As Kyla’s presence demonstrates, teachers and mentors can have just as powerful a maternal influence as flesh and blood. Male figures are largely notable by their absence and the film rises on the strength of its three central performances, all variously explosive, repulsive and hypnotic. Although often self-indulgent and far too long, Mommy acts as more proof that Dolan is a fast-evolving, precocious talent.