(b. March 20, 1989 Montreal, Quebec)
Updated November 2013.
Few filmmakers from any country have enjoyed the kind of success Xavier Dolan experienced with his first two features, J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother, 2009) and Les Amours imaginaire (Heartbeats, 2010). J’ai tué ma mère premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won all of the major prizes (the C.I.C.A.E., Prix regards jeune and the SACD prize) in the Directors Fortnight section before going on to win prizes at festivals in Palm Springs, Namur, Reykjavik and Zagreb, as well as the audience award at Sudbury and the best Canadian feature prizes at both Sudbury and Vancouver. It was also nominated for a César, won two Lumière prizes, was named best Canadian first feature by critics’ associations in Toronto and Vancouver and won the Claude Jutra prize for best first feature at the Genies. Les amours imaginaire received a standing ovation when it premiered as part of the Un Certain Regard programme in Cannes, won the top prize at the Sydney International Film festival and was bought for distribution in the United States by IFC.
The son of veteran actor Manuel Tadros, Dolan began his career acting in commercials at the age of four. (In much of his early acting work he was often credited as Xavier Dolan-Tadros.) He made his debut with the TV movie Miséricorde in 1994 and went on to perform in the controversial Quebec box-office hit Martyrs (2008).
At the age of 19, he wrote, directed and produced J’ai tué ma mère. The film stars Anne Dorval and Dolan as Chantal and Hubert, a single mother and her teenage son, whose relationship is nothing if not tempestuous. They quarrel violently over the most trivial matters with no apparent resolution in sight. She can’t understand why he’s so angry and rude, while the stylish Hubert is mortified by her lack of taste and discretion. One day in class, he attempts to weasel out of a commitment by claiming that his mother has passed away. Appalled when she hears of this, Chantal shows up at school and chases him through the halls screeching at him. This sets in motion a chain of events culminating with Hubert being sent away to boarding school, which devastates Hubert as it separates him from his lover, Antonin. (Neither his mother nor his largely absent father know about Hubert’s sexual orientation.)
J’ai tué ma mère wasn’t funded through conventional means. After being turned down by traditional government funding bodies, Dolan initially financed the film by himself. The movie skilfully shuttles between drama and comedy, often within the same scene. The set piece dinner sequences where Hubert and Chantal go at one another, for instance, range from shocking and intense (because of the brutal way they treat one another) to hysterically funny (the majority of their arguments are really quite ludicrous). The film is distinguished by an extraordinary sense of maturity. Despite his young age, Dolan seems to have subsumed a huge portion of film history, yet somehow made a work that feels informed by the past rather than merely riffing off of it. In spirit, the film feels closer to the work of the French New Wave (particularly Chabrol, Rohmer or Eustache) than most of Québécois cinema. (The references to Truffaut’s Quatre cent coups, incidentally, are entirely accidental. Dolan hadn’t seen the film until after he completed J’ai tué.)
In 2010 Dolan released Les Amour imaginaires, a romantic comedy starring Dolan and long-time friends Monia Chokri and Niels Schneider. The film focuses on a love triangle between two close friends, Marie Camille (Chokri) and François (Dolan) who simultaneously fall for country boy Nicholas (Schneider). They battle one another for his attentions, but Nicholas appears to be completely oblivious to what’s going on. Very different in temperament and look from its predecessor, the ultra-stylish Les Amour feels closer to Almodovar and early Godard than Chabrol, but it’s easily as psychologically acute and as mature as J’ai tué ma mère. If anything, it might be more sophisticated; its bemused, wised-up view of emotional attachment feels more in tune with the views of a much older person than a twenty something wunderkind. (Despite the success of his debut, Dolan again had to self-finance the film, though private investors did come on board by the time he began shooting.)
In 2012, Dolan completed the epic romance Laurence Anyways, about the decades-long affair between a straight woman, Fred (Suzanne Clément, who played the sympathetic teacher in J’ai tué ma mère), who works as a line producer, and the eponymous Laurence (Melvil Poupaud), a teacher and would be poet. Their relationship is defiantly claustrophobic, shutting out the rest of the world through sheer contempt. One day, Laurence informs Fred day that he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body. Still in love with one another, they try to keep their relationship going despite hostility from the world at large, Fred’s family particularly, and most significantly Fred’s own misgivings. Set in the 1990s, the film is shot in a kind of hyper-florid style to capture extreme emotional vicissitudes of the love affair – and feels like Wuthering Heights relocated to the wilds of Montreal with a transgender Heathcliff and a punked-out Catherine. The film was sparked by the real life experiences of a friend of a friend.
Splitting critics when it debuted at Cannes with many European and some Quebecois critics lauding its audacity and North American especially Anglo critics complaining about its “self-indulgence”, the film went on to win the City of Toronto & Canada Goose Award for Best Canadian Feature Film at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. The jury’s statement read “For its breathless cinematic energy and its entirely new love story, the jury felt honoured to watch such unfettered genius at play.”
In 2013, Dolan completed Tom at the Farm, a marked departure from his previous work in its ties to genre work, though -- like its predecessors -- the film examines desire. In this case, Tom (well played by Dolan himself) is an urbanite who travels to the countryside to bury Guillame, his lover, who grew up in the region. He soon discovers that Guillame’s mother, Agathe (Lise Roy) knows nothing about him, or much of Guillame’s life in Montreal. These aspects of his life have been hidden by his older brother, Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), a raging homophobe and sociopath whose behavior is so outlandish he’s even shunned by his neighbours at the funeral. It soon becomes clear to Tom that Francis has no intention of letting him leave the farm and as one disturbing revelation leads to another, Tom begins to wilt under the pressure and his own behavior becomes increasingly more erratic and inexplicable. Adapted from Marcel Marc-Bouchard’s play, Tom at the Farm is an update on a sub-genre, ala the old Tallulah Bankhead/Stefanie Powers chestnut, Die! Die! My Darling, where the new member of a family finds out that they’ve effectively married into a brood of psychopaths. Setting it in the Quebec countryside ups the political and social ante considerably however, obliquely taking on the pure laine notion that the countryside is the spiritual and emotional centre of the culture.
Debuting at the Venice film festival, the film met, not surprisingly, with controversy. Dolan took on one Variety critic to task when he called the film “self-indulgent”. In general, the film was well received. In an overview of the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival in Film Comment, Joumane Chahine called the film “a highlight and a confirmation of the undeniable talent of this rising voice of Quebec cinema. … [W]hat makes Tom at the Farm a particularly interesting work is that under the guise – the very efficient guise – of a psychological thriller lies another more intimate, poignant piece on love and mourning. It is this unusual mix of spine-tingling and heart-wrenching that leaves such an enduring mark.”
Tom at the Farm won a FIPRESCI award at Venice – which would probably make Dolan the youngest filmmaker to win significant prizes at three major festivals.