MATTHIAS ET MAXIME
Xavier DOLAN — CANADA — 119 minutes
IN A NUTSHELL
Matthias (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas) and Maxime (played by the young director himself, Xavier Dolan) are childhood friends, who are asked to share a kiss for a friend’s college project. Both are seemingly hetrosexual, but this kiss changes their lives. And, soon questions are raised about Matthia’s and Maxime’s sexuality. (words by Bianca Garner)
CRITICAL RESPONSE
“Matthias & Maxime builds to a few touching scenes that examine how straight men navigate the trickiness of intimacy, but elsewhere the script overdoes its critique of male bonding rituals, relying on broad characterisations and obvious commentary. Dolan’s film is so awash in the chaos of these men that it fails to provide a little focus to their blurry lives.” — Tim Grierson, Screen Daily
“Over time, Dolan starts compensating for that cartoonishness by blanketing the rest of the drama beneath a funereal chill; a bleakness that he punctuates with occasional needle drops that range from the wonderfully unironic (Britney Spears) to the safely effective (Phosphorescent). Dolan doesn’t always find the right groove, but it’s nice to hear that he still puts together a shoot-for-the-moon soundtrack like every emotion is the one that will last forever.” — David Ehrlich, IndieWire
“What’s missing is the blazing urgency — the purpose and passion that made movies like Laurence Anyways, Heartbeats, Tom at the Farm and Mommy, for all their excesses and errors of taste, play like the work of an artist putting his wildly, thrillingly, at times grotesquely beating heart right up on the screen. Those films flaunted a sense of formal and emotional risk-taking, but also a dramatic richness — messy, complicated characters, layers of provocative ambiguity, tension and stakes.” — Jon Frosch, The Hollywood Reporter
PRIZE PROSPECTS
Xavier Dolan is something of a regular at the Croisette. Already a multi-prize winner at Cannes, the young filmmaker is back with yet another slight shift of the narrative pendulum. A film in which, like a couple of his earlier films, the director casts himself. There’ll be no acting prize here, but its an intriguing conundrum how this year’s Jury will assess the filmmaker’s worth with this one.
In Dolan’s last outing, Cannes 2016, It’s Only The End Of The World had a mixed bag of reviews, yet went on to win the Grand Prize – ahead of much fancied films like Aquarius, Elle, The Handmaiden, Julieta, Paterson, Toni Erdmann. I don’t think that is happening here, though there is something, as form demonstrates, that Cannes finds hard to ignore about the 30 year-old Canadian veteran. It seems to bet against him is sticking your neck out, but I’ll do just that anyway. (words by Robin Write)
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