MOMMY

2.5 stars (out of 5)

French-Canadian writer, director, producer, editor and costume designer (!!!) Xavier Dolan’s low-budget dramas all have an uncomfortably autobiographical aspect, and his mystifyingly well-received latest is just as indulgent, pretentious and infuriating as the rest of them.

Diane (‘Die’) Després (Anne Dorval) is a 46 year old widow whose violently loopy son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) has been in and out of institutions due to his aggressive ADHD behaviour, and when he gets thrown out of another for burning down a cafeteria and injuring a student, she’s forced to live with the crazy bastard once again. Steve has an Oedipal rage thing going on and simultaneously adores and despises his Mommy, blaming her for his Dad’s death and their general lack of cash, and their chaotic lives take a turn when they meet neighbour Kyla (Suzanne Clément, looking weirdly like Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa Simpson), who lives across the street with a husband who treats her like crap. And this background in abuse means that Kyla isn’t going to put up with Steve’s nonsense, and when she stands up to him one afternoon in Die’s absence he almost respects her for a while, but soon the evil kid slips back into his old ways, attacking Mommy’s potential boyfriend, fighting and flirting with the local bad boys, and freaking out in foul-mouthed French (and the subtitles have a Hell of time making sense of what he’s saying too as, for example, the first time he meets Kyla he muses, “Her ass smells of f***in’ roses, it’s written in the stars!”).

Needlessly and exhaustingly epic, Dolan’s film’s drawn-from-his-own-life and ‘queer cinema’-ish elements make it, for some, a risky pic to attack, but, well, that’s just too bad, as this is, at times, just about unbearable, with Steve such a despicable dickhead you long for the chance to kick his head in. But hang on: there is at least one startling trick here that redeems it from the indie scrap-heap, a perhaps never-seen-before technical stunt that’s deeply intriguing, seriously cinematic and impossible to discuss without giving it all away. So you might need to sit through the damn movie to see it, yo muthas.