SLIFF 2010 Review: I KILLED MY MOTHER

If you can get past it’s shocking title, I KILLED MY MOTHER, you’ll discover an intense, study of a young man’s complex, emotional relationship with his single mother. You’ll also find a very talented young man named Xavier Dolan who not only gives a terrific acting performance, but also wrote and directed this French Canadian domestic comedy-drama.

We first see Hubert (Dolan) speaking directly to the camera during one of his black and white video confessionals. Like many sixteen year-olds, he is embarrassed and frustrated by his parents. Or in this case, parent as his father left shortly after he was was born. Hubert vents his rage against his mother, Chantale (Anne Dorval). He seems to find fault with everything she does (how she eats, what she listens to on the radio, her fashion style) and the drive to his school becomes a battle. At school Hubert finds solace with his boyfriend, Antonin, and a sympathetic economics teacher.

When assigned to interview his mother for the class, Hubert lies to his teacher and says his mother is dead (thus the title). When this gets back to Chantale, she shows up at the school to publicly humiliate the boy. Happily, Hubert spends most of his time immediately after school at Antonin’s home with his much more permissive mother. As one of Hubert’s teachers submits his writings to a contest, his parents get back together in order to ship him off to a strict boarding school. There he experiments with drugs, gets involved with another boy, and becomes the target of homophobic bullies. These scenes are broken up by bits of Hubert’s monologues and flashbacks to an idyllic past when he and his mother were inseparable.

As I mentioned earlier, Dolan does a superb job behind the camera and in front. His tirades build up quickly into full fledged explosions very realistically. This adds great poignancy to the scenes when Hubert tries to be considerate and cooperative with his mother. Dorval is terrific as a sometimes clueless, sometimes emotionally fragile mother. When she learns of her son’s homosexuality from Antonin’s mother, she’s hurt not by the news of his sexuality, but by the fact that he never shared it with her. She conveys all this emotions in her eyes. These two performances make this coming-of -age tale well worth seeing. If this is what Xavier Dolan can do at twenty, it will be interesting to see where his film career will go.

I KILLED MY MOTHER will play during the 19th Annual Stella Artois St. Louis International Film Festival on Sunday, November 14th at 7:00 pm at the Plaza Frontenac Cinema.