Killer debut

This article originally ran on June 5, 2009.

Despite the shocking tabloid punch of its title, J’ai tué ma mere (I Killed My Mother), the debut feature by Quebec wunderkind Xavier Dolan is actually a tender love story. In it, the 20-year-old director depicts a single mother and her son as a troubled couple, so deeply connected that neither can leave their abusive relationship.

'With a single parent and child, it’s just the two of you. Like an old couple, you become allergic to each other. The love is as intense as the hatred.' —Xavier Dolan, director of I Killed My Mother

"The physical expression of their love of course isn’t the same as a married couple, but the nature of the emotion is," Dolan says of his darkly comic, autobiographical work. "With a single parent and child, it’s just the two of you. Like an old couple, you become allergic to each other. The love is as intense as the hatred," the young director says during a recent interview, sitting in the Radio-Canada lounge as Montreal journalists line up to speak with  Quebec’s latest filmmaking prodigy. "But in a couple, you can break up and say, ‘I’m leaving you.’ But with your mother, you can’t do that."

Written, produced, directed and starring Dolan, I Killed My Mother has wowed the international film community and spurred a collective burst of national pride here after its extraordinary debut at the Cannes Film Festival, where it picked up three awards: the Art Cinema Award from an international jury of independent film programmers; the SACD prize for best French-language film; and the Regards jeunes prize, which is given to an outstanding first-time director by young film fans. I Killed My Mother has already sold to six countries, and Brad Pitt’s production company has expressed interest in distributing it.

"I’m mesmerized," says Dolan, a former child actor. When I meet him, he is wearing a navy hoodie, black jeans and oversized Buddy Holly glasses. The thoughtful filmmaker, who speaks nearly flawless English, seems slightly shy, but grounded and confident. He also appears nonplussed by his new celebrity status.

"The public’s reaction has been so sincere and so cheerful. They told me with their clapping that devoting three years of my life to this was worth it," says Dolan, adding the script is based on his life as a frustrated adolescent. Dolan financed the project with $150,000 of his personal savings, and received $200,000 from Quebec’s film financing body SODEC for post-production costs.

When he was 16, Dolan approached celebrated Quebec actress Anne Dorval  with a script he describes now as mediocre. "There was lots of information – too much," Dolan says with a laugh. "Then I came up with the idea for I Killed My Mother. I wanted [Dorval] to play the mother and she was interested. She also had a mother she was incompatible with."

The film’s central character, Hubert Minet (Dolan), is a 17-year-old discovering his identity as both an artist and a gay man. Hubert is irritated by nearly everything his conventional, working-class mother does: She likes leopard-print tights and lamp shades and goes to a tanning salon; she gets food on her face when she eats; she watches trashy TV, plays solitaire on the computer and has no idea who Jackson Pollock is. In short, Hubert finds her unrefined, embarrassing and at times downright disgusting. And like a domineering husband, he makes her pay for not pleasing him with a stream of abusively sarcastic comments.

The character’s hatred of his mother is "nourished," as Dolan puts it, by comparing her with  his boyfriend’s mother, a stylish intellectual whose elegant home is full of space and light. "I wanted to contrast the atmosphere with Hubert’s mother’s house, which is kitsch, dark and suffocating," says Dolan, who also handled the film’s art direction. "I want the viewers to want to escape from her space just like he does."

Hubert is so ashamed of his mother’s job – she’s a bookkeeper – that he tells his teacher she’s dead, a lie that produces one of the film’s most comical and heartbreaking scenes. Dressed in a goofy faux-fur hat and high-heeled boots, Hubert’s outraged mother storms into his classroom and yells, "Do I look dead to you?" Mortified, he flees, while his mother, acting like a jilted lover, chases him down. When she falls, he refuses to help her up.

Dorval’s character grieves over the fact that the sole object of her affection for nearly 20 years is violently rejecting  her. "He used to tell me everything," she says to her artificially tanned confidante Denise, marvelously played by Monique Spaziani. And while we wince at Hubert’s meanness, we understand that he is fighting for his identity. Hubert wants to be an artist, while his mother keeps asking him why he can’t be like other boys his age.

"The movie is about the impossible roles that life forces us to fulfill. At one point I say in the film that I wasn’t meant to have a mother and my teacher responds, ‘Perhaps your mother wasn’t meant to have a son,’" Dolan says.

While the relationship between Hubert and his mother isn’t incestuous, it goes beyond the traditional boundaries — a courageous and original narrative to pursue. Dolan drives this point home in a tongue-in-cheek yet genuinely romantic dream sequence in which Hubert chases his mother, dressed in a flowing white wedding gown, across a meadow.

While the film is an exceptional achievement, it has its longueurs. There are a few self-indulgent scenes between Hubert and his gay lover, and while the intense, complicated love Hubert feels for his mother is powerfully depicted, the mother character occasionally comes across as a caricature.

Unlike so many Quebec films of the past decade, I Killed My Mother’s strength lies in its well-crafted screenplay, rather than its artful cinematography. In a number of recent films — among them Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique — exceptional cinematography has masked an underdeveloped script. It’s extraordinary that someone as young as Dolan was able to write such an insightful, compassionate screenplay.

"I was a monster when I was a kid – but I was a lucid monster," he says. "I was always able to see myself doing what I was doing and I also saw my mother’s perspective."

J’ai tué ma mere (I Killed My Mother) opens in Toronto on Feb. 5.

Patricia Bailey is a writer and broadcaster based in Montreal.