Dhe mood is tense regardless of the natural beauties: six friends have each other during the end of the day Indian summer Gathered in a lonely house near Montreal, but one of them brought his generally unpopular sister with him. This Érika is a little younger than the male sextet, who is just entering professional life, but immediately has the big word on arrival – full of academic jargon and anglicisms. This initial constellation could be good for various developments: In a traditional comedy this annoying woman would be purified and finally married, in a classic tragedy drawn for life. In today’s horror film, she would be killed (and probably not just her). And in a melodrama everyone involved would be unhappy. But Xavier Dolan chooses a fifth way.
The Canadian director has been famous for more than a decade and is still only thirty-two years old. So he is close to his six masters in terms of age, and he also plays one of them: Maxime, the most unstable in his circle of friends and therefore on the brink of a two-year stay in Australia (the film was made in 2019, which explains it utopian today sounding travel destination; the pandemic also thwarted the German theatrical release originally planned for last November). “Matthias & Maxime” is the name of Dolan’s film, and anyone who knows his previous work, which is attributed to gay cinema, will suspect that no one here is further interested in Erika. But the two title heroes for each other.
Awakening kiss
Even so, Érika is the catalyst of the plot. As a film student, she has to quickly turn off a thesis and asks Matthias and Maxime for a kiss among men in front of the camera. The two have been friends from childhood, but the provoked love gesture triggers a passion that is doubly confusing for Matthias so shortly before Maxime’s departure. He is the most established in the circle of friends, works in a large law firm and is in a relationship with the beautiful Sarah. But we don’t even know that when the revival kiss is given.
As a director, Dolan is far too smart not to take his own image into account in his script. You can see that Matthias and Maxime are not very comfortable with filming, but as a viewer you blame Érika’s verbal vehemence. The fact that the six young gentlemen also constantly incorporated Anglicisms into their French from the start – “anyway” is probably the most widely used word in the storyline – makes their contempt for Erika wrong; the misogyny, now habitually imputed to Dolan, is the result of his merciless view of women, who are, however, the most interesting characters in his films for that very reason. Actresses are likely to scramble for roles like those played by Anne Dorval and Micheline Bernard as the mothers of Matthias and Maxime. And the brat Érika is a celebration for Camille Felton – precisely because she doesn’t just have to look beautiful like Gabriel d’Almeida Freitas as Matthias. If you complain about clichés about Dolan, please do so here.
All borders fall
His maxim, on the other hand, is distorted by a large red mole on his face, which is never addressed by the surroundings, but which attracts everyone’s attention – in the film and in front of the screen. Once the frustrated maxim washes it off in the mirror, but of course the camera catches it again when panning backwards. A film can work wonders like our wishful thinking, and it is just as unreal. Xavier Dolan loves such handcrafted pieces.
That is why, after a somewhat tough first half hour, his film offers a series of remarkable planned sequences in the remaining three quarters of the running time, often diegetically supported by the use of music, which nevertheless shows its artificiality, for example when a young lawyer from Toronto arrives, who talks about self-oblivion under his headphones overlooks Matthias waiting for him. Or in the most beautiful scene, when to the music of Arcade Fire (“Signs of Life”) the farewell party for Maxime gets out of hand (in slow motion), before shortly afterwards the boundaries between Matthias and Maxime also fall. And a subsequent drive by André Turpin, Dolan’s permanent cameraman, is simple, but incredibly effective, some will say: gimmicky. But they have no sympathy for pathos.
And that in turn loves Dolan. In “Matthias & Maxime” he also uses cuts (as usual he is his own editor) that do not spell out the emotional world of the characters, but rather hide them behind black panels. For example in the case of the momentous kiss, in which the meeting of the mouths is covered by Érika’s digital camera and the proof of love itself is even cut away. It is as if the camera itself was sometimes in a confused tumult: blurring, time-lapse, jump cuts.
While Maxime is the descendant of a family known as white trash If she did not live in the French-speaking province of Québec, Matthias obviously had everything. All the more his world gets into disarray. The fact that there is a twist at the end that suggests a big commitment behind a small act is typical of Dolan. Hope loves last.
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